Hello,
On 14/07/2024 1:03 am, Guillaume Tucker wrote:
very interested to hear whether people feel it would be
beneficial to work towards a more exhaustive solution supported
upstream: kernel.org Docker images or something close such as
Dockerfiles in Git or another type of images with all the
dependencies included. How does that sound?
A few thoughts around this:
Having first party Dockerfiles could be useful but how would they be
used? Perhaps building a kernel in such a container could be plumbed
into Kbuild, such that the container manager could be invoked to build
the image if it does not exist then build the kernel in that image? This
might be a lofty idea but it would remove a lot of the friction of using
containers to build the kernel so that more people would adopt it?
That's a great idea, and I think it's why having a live
discussion at Plumbers would make sense as it's going to be
harder to reach answers in a thread like this.
In fact I went ahead and made a small PoC for this as an experiment:
https://gitlab.com/gtucker/linux/-/commits/linux-6.7-make-container
Another aspect of this is discoverability. I think a big problem with a
project like TuxMake is that while it is developed for the kernel
community, it is not a first party project, so without word of mouth,
there is not a great way for other people to hear about it.
I think it would be a good idea to try and solicit feedback from the
greater kernel community at large to ensure that whatever solution is
decided on will work for both testing systems and
developers/maintainers. I think that a first party solution for having a
consistent and easy to set up/work with build environment has been
needed for some time but unfortunately, I am not sure how much
discussion around this problem has happened directly with those folks.
Yes, that was my intention here with this thread to start
widening the audience with the upstream community. My
understanding is that the issue hasn't been suitably framed to
enable constructive discussion yet. I'll consider submitting a
proposal for the Toolchain track next.
[1]https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1665/
[2]https://hub.docker.com/u/tuxmake
[3]https://www.linaro.org/blog/tuxmake-building-linux-with-kernel-org-toolchains/
As an aside, consider using me as a point of contact for anything
ClangBuiltLinux related instead of Nick going forward, he has stepped
away to focus on LLVM libc for the immediate future.
Noted, thank you.
Thanks a lot for bring up this topic. I think it is important to work on
and I look forward to talking through this at Plumbers.
That would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks already for your
insightful feedback.
The talk is happening today, slides are available:
https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1928/
I'll reply later this week with a follow-up from the live
discussions at Plumbers and maybe this will lead to some RFCs or
a few patches.
Thanks,
Guillaume
