Long "voyage": modpost to work and compile

Ah... after weeks of hacking through kernel code and Makefiles, I am finally able to compile and run modpost , for compiling my kernel modules on Voyage Linux 0.4.

This is the story: I need to install some additional kernel modules for the WORKIT project on Voyage. All of the kernel modules pass step 1 of the Makefile, and they compile, but then I get the error:

Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST 1 modules
/bin/sh: scripts/mod/modpost: No such file or directory

A long search for modpost lead me to find that modpost is used for compiling modules, and is part of the kernel development tools (sorry, missing the link for that post, and couldn't find it again on Google - tells you how exotic this modpost is.)

After a lot more trial and error - which included downloading and trying to recompile the Voyage Linux kernels - I found two posts today that helped immensely in coming to the last step:

• No modpost directory - Linux Forums : helped me realize how to build the modpost (but it was referencing the wrong directory; on my Voyage Linux, the code is at /lib/modules/2.6.20-486-voyage/build)

But I got the exact same error message as in the forum post: unrecognized command line option "-m".

I copied the makefile command, removed the -m directive, and tried compiling again and got a "missing elfconfig.h" error message and other errors dependent on that.

A search for "elfconfig.h" led me to a post of the Linux kernel mailing list about missing elfconfig.h which hints at running "make modules" and "make scripts".

Running those two commands on the /lib/modules/2.6.20-486-voyage/build directory solves the problem - it creates the elfconfig.h (!) file and compiles modpost. (Expect this to take a while - it makes all modules and scripts.)