Messages in this thread |  | | From | Andrzej Krzysztofowicz <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] CONFIG_EISA note in Documentation/Configure.help | Date | Wed, 15 Nov 2000 00:37:09 +0100 (CET) |
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> On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 05:07:22PM -0700, Steven Cole wrote: > > +EISA support > > +CONFIG_EISA > > + The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) bus was > > (i) I am a bit unhappy about adding configuration options > like this. It regularly happens that I want to compile some kernel
You are unhappy, I am happy. Now I can disable some drivers, which I am sure I don't need setting a single option instead of few. Also it anables better separation of architecture specyfic drivers: do you know of Amiga with EISA ? Does my mips support it ?
# grep drivers/net/Config.in arch/*/config.in arch/alpha/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/arm/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/i386/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/ia64/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/mips/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/mips64/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/ppc/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in arch/sh/config.in: source drivers/net/Config.in
> for some machine and have to grep the source and look at the config > files how to enable something. A machine with RTL-8139? Let me see, > that requires CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL. (Not today, but until recently.) > How do I get FireWire? Also requires CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL. This > CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is a very strange option. I know about my hardware, > perhaps, but there is no reason to suppose that I know about the > progress in development of Linux drivers for this hardware. > Instead of having a global CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL we should have > a warning at each place that the driver is alpha.
Look at CML2 project. It supports a function showing all possible options, if you choose... But it is project for Linux 2.5.
> If one does "make xconfig" then one sees a greyed out area, > and the sometimes nontrivial puzzle is how to enable it. > But with "make menuconfig" one never even sees the option,
But in "make config" you see much more than you want...
> (ii) In particular about this CONFIG_EISA and the given explanation. > I have a computer, yes, several. But do I know whether it has > an EISA bus? A week ago I hardly knew what EISA was, and would have > been unable to answer. Today I know the answer for a handful of them > but have not yet investigated the others.
OK. I tried to build an universal kernel, which supports every hardware & software kernel drivers I ever needed on i386. It was much too big to boot... (6 MB compressed)
> Now, if this knowledge was of major importance for the kernel > then perhaps I had to learn about such details. > However, CONFIG_EISA is almost completely superfluous, is not > required at compile time, can easily be tested at run time, > in other words adding such an option is a very stupid thing to do.
If you have too much memory, you can always choose CONFIG_EISA=y by default. > [Steven, you understand that I would have written under CONFIG_EISA: > say Y here - there is never any reason to say N, unless there exists > hardware where the canonical probing hangs the machine.] > > The number of configuration options should be minimized. > That is good for the user - fewer questions to answer.
Note, that "number of configuration options should be minimized" and "fewer questions to answer" are not equivalent.
BTW, CONFIG_MCA needs some cleaning, also.
Andrzej -- ======================================================================= Andrzej M. Krzysztofowicz ankry@mif.pg.gda.pl tel. (0-58) 347 14 61 Wydz.Fizyki Technicznej i Matematyki Stosowanej Politechniki Gdanskiej - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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