On 06/03/2010 12:26 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Thu, 3 Jun 2010, Michael Ellerman wrote: >> >> You can sort of do that today, by just storing a delta, but oldconfig >> will silently turn off things you have enabled if prereqs change, so >> that doesn't really work I think. > > I think you can do it today with various hacks. Up to and including > basically doing something that just selects the options you want. > > IOW, you could likely have a human-written Kconfig.<platform> file that > just does > > define_bool MYPLATFORM y > select .. everything I need .. > > include Kconfig.main > > or a number of other tricks. > > Ingo and the x86 folks (who I really think have done a very good job, and > there really aren't any crazy defconfig files there) have this "make > randconfig" together with scripted requirements so that you can actually > _boot_ the random config, just because the requirements make sure that the > things needed for booting on the test setup are selected. > > I forget exactly what the build setup there is (Ingo described it to me > long time ago, but since I don't even want to have a build farm in my > home, I didn't care much). > > But we certainly _can_ do a better job than the 'defconfig' thing that was > really never meant for the kind of use it sees in ARM/POWERPC/SH/MIPS, and > that really isn't appropriate for any manual editing (so people just run > "make oldconfig" with tweaking or something, and then use the newly > generated file). > It certainly looks a better way to handle this. However, considering the facts that there are so many platforms out there, and doing a transition without breaking any of them is a lot work, it's actually easier to just reduce the number of defconfig at this moment, provided that most ARM platforms with the same SoC are able to be built into a single kernel. There are some exceptions though, I'd suggest not to introduce any other defconfig for these platforms until their problem is solved. Russell has setup a thread for this issue in linux-arm-kernel ML, so hopefully there will be a lot patches around to address it. There are some specific problems with ARM, e.g. some platforms are really not maintained for a long time, and even no way to find someone or some machine to test. And even with one defconfig per SoC, there could still be about > 60 defconfigs there (compared with 178 at this moment). > And I suspect that it really is best to just remove the existing defconfig > files. People can see them in the history to pick up what the heck they > did, but no way will any sane model ever look even _remotely_ like them, > so they really aren't a useful basis for going forward. > > But don't worry. It didn't happen this merge window, obviously. > > Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arm-msm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
