Messages in this thread | | | From | "Ulrich Windl" <> | Date | Thu, 17 Dec 1998 11:40:43 +0100 | Subject | 2.1.131: some quality thoughts |
| |
(I'm not subscribed here)
Hello,
after upgrading my home system significantly, I was able to work on the 2.1.131 tree. Using CVS I have a few problems:
/usr/src/linux/net/core is ignored by CVS standards. Shipping a ".cvsignore" in the kernel tree is not an optimal sulution, because the logic is inverted, and there's no ".cvsinclude" per concept.
I know that it's ugly, but could "core" be renamed before 2.2 comes out? Possible candidated might be "netcore", "kern[el]", "nucleus", "base". A symbolic link could be added to tar archives to support the old name if necessary.
I also noticed that CVS does not like it if you build in a checked-out tree: After that I couldn't "cvs diff" nor "cvs commit", because some files were missing beyond include/config in the CVS subdirectories. Maybe the Makefiles or Rules can be fixed to avoid that problem.
Anotherthing with versioned symbols: Currently the SMP definition is passed as prefix to the genksyms program to prevent crashed due to incompatible binaries. IMHO other prefixes for the CPU type or memory alignment options (compilation flags) should be passed as well (I once had a crash loading i386 compiled modules into a Pentium compiled kernel; happens if you use distributions and recompile your kernel)
Unfortunately genksyms just adds prefixes to the name. I haven't checked the sources, but it would be more reasonable if all the prefixes would be appended to the "mangled name", and then just go into the CRC computation. Thus you could add as many prefixes as you like without blowing up the symbol table size. If you think the digits are not significant, we could change to "base 2*26+10" (A-Za-z0-9) instead of simple digits to represent the CRC.
I also think the makefile should at least output whether SMP is on or not when doing "make config". Also the Makefile could be smart enough to do "make mrproper" if necessary to compile after SMP is changed (my compilation failed even after a "make clean" when I switched to non-SMP. Someone said that "make mrproper" would do the trick).
A few dependencies are not yet correct in the Makefile: E.g. when building versioned modules, compilation of serial.c failed (I hacked it!). After changing only serial.c and restarting make, loop.o was also recompiled, even that had been finished before...
So long, Ulrich
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |