I have a kernel patch that I want to apply to a RedHat 7.3 machine. I would like to have the kernel otherwise an exact copy of the kernel installed by RedHat.

What is the best way to do this?

download the SRPM for the redhat kernel, and run rpm -i

put your patch file in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

and add the 2 lines to the SPEC file.

(you will see a whole bunch of stuff about patching in the SPEC file)

then you can use rpmbuild to make a custom RPM fo the kernel

Yup. Seemed to work.

I've got another question, though. The rpmbuild seemed to build quite a few kernels, like a plain one, a bigmem one, an smp one, etc. How do I install the right one? I need the smp kernel.