Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Automatic .config generation | From | Valdis.Kletnieks@vt ... | Date | Sun, 15 May 2005 07:13:41 -0400 |
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On Sun, 15 May 2005 11:52:51 +0200, Jesper Juhl said: > What's the big gain? Where's the harm in just building all the sound > modules - you only load one in the end anyway, and the space taken by the > other modules is negligible with the disk sizes of today I'd say (ok, > there's some extra build time involved, but that shouldn't be a big deal
If you're doing building and testing on an older/slower box, the build time and disk size matters - there's 481 'y' or 'm' in my current .config, versus 1701 in the Fedora -1287 kernel. Being able to do 3 build/reboot loops in an hour versus one every 90 mins makes a big difference. Being able to do a build in 400M instead of 2G means that a 7G /usr/src/ partition can hold 8 or 9 trees, rather than 3 (useful for those "when did this start" regressions, especially in combo with that 20 min versus 90 build time. ;)
> you want. Besides, it's not as if you have to redo your kernel config from > scratch every time you want a new kernel. Make your favorite config once, > build and install that kernel and then when you want a newer kernel simply > either cd linux-<version>; zcat /proc/config.gz > .config ; make oldconfig > and then build the new kernel using your previous config.
Yes, that's easy if you're working on *the same hardware*, so new device drivers aren't of interest, and the only thing 'make oldconfig' will prompt you for is new non-driver functionality. However, that's not everybody...
The function is for building streamlined configs for new systems - you get in a Frobozz2005 laptop, and although you probably have your own favorite set of values for things like which netfilter modules to build, you probably have *no* idea right off what device drivers you need. So you end up either going the RedHat route and building it *all* anyhow, or spending a lot of time figuring out which drivers you need for *this* box. And you can't even trust the vendor sometimes - the Dell laptop I'm typing on was part of a larger order. A co-worker got another C840, and we had both ordered the same CD/RW-DVD drive. Machines had consecutive Dell service/serial numbers - and different vendor drives (mine had a Toshiba, his had something else).
I won't even *start* on the number of subtly different AC'97-ish sound chips Dell has gone through.. ;)
If you have a better solution to the "minimize *total* time to build optimized kernels for 12 different machines that just got dropped on your workbench this morning" feel free to share.. ;) [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] | |