Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 6 Mar 2019 09:35:21 +0000 | From | Mark Rutland <> | Subject | Re: Smarter Kconfig help |
| |
On Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 05:31:12PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote: > Guys,
Hi Russell,
> We need to be smarter when writing Kconfig help. I'm just going > through updating my build trees with the results of 5.0 development, > and a number of the help texts are next to useless. For example, > > PVPANIC - is this something that should be enabled for a host or > guest kernel? Answer: you have to read the driver code to find out.
When I looked at the help text:
This driver provides support for the pvpanic device. pvpanic is a paravirtualized device provided by QEMU; it lets a virtual machine (guest) communicate panic events to the host.
... it seemed clear to me that this was for a guest, given the text says QEMU provides the device. I guess you read that as meaning QEMU asks the host kernel to provide the device to the guest?
Do you have a suggestion for how to word that unambiguously?
> IMX_IRQSTEER - which i.MX SoCs does this apply to? The help text > just says: > > "Support for the i.MX IRQSTEER interrupt multiplexer/remapper." > > which doesn't say which SoCs this should be enabled for - it turns > out that grepping for the driver's DT compatible string, none of > the 32-bit ARM cores have support for this, yet we still default > it to enabled there. It seems the help text should at the very > least tell the user that this is not applicable to i.MX SoCs with > 32-bit ARM cores. > > I'm sure there's many other instances of this... I suspect that > it's caused by review concentrating mostly on the technical aspects > of the code and the Kconfig help text just gets forgotten about.
Just to be clear, in general what you want is for Kconfig help to be clearer about *when* an option is relevant, right?
I'll try to bear that in mind when reviewing in future.
Thanks, Mark.
| |