On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 06:22:43PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Russell King - ARM Linux wrote: > > > > That's a good thing in some ways and a bad thing in others. Having > > it guarantee to fail if you try installing an ARM kernel onto an > > x86 machine is definitely a good thing. That said, it's not something > > I've ever accidentally done. > > > > I guess we could have it error out if you are building a non-native > architecture but don't set CROSS_COMPILE. Either that or we could > default $INSTALLKERNEL to $(CROSS_COMPILE)installkernel, which would be > backwards compatible. I had googled a bit to try to analyse how much use this feature has seen. And I only managed to find the original patch implementing this. None of the books I found mention this in their install kernel chapets either. So the conclusion - it is not widely used. Russell is right that one implicit use is that "make CROSS_COMPILE=foo install" would fail. And with this patch it would succeed. Trying to error out is we are doing a non-native build is not the right answer. People may like to have a custom script that can ftp the new kernel somewhere or stuff like that. All that combined with the fact that using the binutils/gcc CROSS_COMPILE prefix is the wrong solution anyway made me conclude that we should fix this rather than implement it in a different way. That combined with the fact that CROSS_COMPILE has two primary usages: - binutils/gcc prefix when building for another architecture - distcc/ccache The latter does not fit well with the installkernel use. I briefly looked into creating another way to specify distcc / ccache. But the current way to do things works well - so I dropped it again. Sam -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
