First linux kernel compile in the 3.x era

The 2.6 branch of the linux kernel is now in maintenance mode only. Torvalds jumped to version 3.x to celebrate the kernel's twentieth birthday. There wasn't really any major changes in architecture, as was the case in going from versions 2.2 to 2.4, or from 2.4 to 2.6. From the outside, it looks like Torvalds caught the same version number bug that was going around this summer. The grass is greener phenomenon is typified by Mozilla's changing their numbering scheme for firefox. They abandoned their 3.6.x series, in favor of 4.x, 5.x, etc. and it is currently at 8.0.1.

Here is a spoke-wheel graphic showing the space used by the modules of the two most recently compiled kernels.

This kernel is more stable with my hardware, i.e. using Intel chipsets (i9xx).

Update: 2011-12-17 I applied the patch, recompiled and installed the 3.1.5 update to avoid more nasty bugs on my hardware.

Update: 2011-12-29 Same drill to update to 3.1.6. Version 3.1.5 choked when compiling firefox 9.0.1 on my hardware. The kernel, version 3.1.6, compiled firefox in about an hour.

Update: 2012-01-05 Same drill to update to 3.2.0. Still having some crash issues on 3.1.6. The last crash seemed to be related to wireless networking.