On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 8:53 AM, Jean Delvare <jdelv...@suse.de> wrote: > Hi all, > > Configuring kernels from scratch has become an incredibly long and > tedious task. The reason is that the number of drivers and options has > exploded in the past few years. Which in itself is great - Linux is > successful, yeah! - but the side effects must be dealt with. > 6000-line .config files are no fun. > > Earlier today, I found that NET_CADENCE is set in my x86-64 kernel > configuration. The two ethernet drivers below this menu are for ARM > machines. I really shouldn't be asked about that on x86-64. I just sent > a patch addressing this specific issue, which follows about 50 similar > patches from me for similar issues in various subsystems. But I can't > do all of that by myself, this is too much work quantitatively, and I > am not always the best person to find out the proper hardware > dependencies that should be added.
I have much the same problem when I'm doing the config changes for Fedora kernel rebases. I've gotten to the point where I can somewhat guess based on the driver name which arch it's for (lately the majority are for ARM), but that isn't really a great way to handle things. Only being asked about options for the arch being configured is much better than playing guessing games. > I would like to call for proper hardware dependencies to become a > general trend: every new hardware-specific driver which is added to the > kernel should depend on ($hardware || COMPILE_TEST), so as to make it > clear right away, which type of hardware is expected to need the driver > in question. > > $hardware can be the top-level architecture (e.g. ARM), but can also go > down to sub-architecture/platform (e.g. ARCH_AT91 or PLATFORM_AT32AP) or > even machine (e.g. PICOXCELL_PC3X3). The list can always be extended > later if needed. Ideally we should restrict as much as possible as long > as the result is easy to maintain, not too complex, and not likely to > break in a near future. > > Thanks to COMPILE_TEST, we don't lose the build test coverage, and it > also makes it possible for anyone to still build the driver if the > dependency is too strict (as a temporary workaround until it gets fixed > upstream, that is.) > > Does anyone object to this? I think this is a great idea. Thanks for bringing up the suggestion. josh -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
