Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 08:13:12 -0600
From: yodaiken@fsmlabs.com
On Sun, Apr 09, 2000 at 06:53:08PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> There really is not a whole lot preventing the "install" script
> on a driver cdrom from building the kernel module from source.
> It can even pop up a little "building driver module" dialogue
> with a cute little thermometer moving along as the thing builds
> itself. :-)
Ted and I designed the entire thing at LinuxExpo,
with scripts to even figure out what kernel version etc.
We only neglected to actually write some code, but as everyone
knows that's a trivial detail. :-(
There's actually code available; I do this for the Rocketport driver,
and David Hinds has had similar scripts available for his PCMCIA
drivers.
As far as generalizing it for other drivers, nope no one has done that
yet. It would be nice to get support into the mainline Linux kernel,
though, so it didn't require quite as much hacking. Right now there's a
lot of adjustments that have to be made from time-to-time to deal with
changes on the kernel build procedure, and (worse of all)
distribution-specific hacks to kernel build procedure, especially to
deal with modversions and generating multiple different kernels with
different configurations from the same build tree.
As a result my driver build procedure doesn't support Mandrake-built
kernels, since I just don't have that many hours in a day. If someone
wants to use the rocketport driver, I tell them to either build a stock
kernel from scratch, chose another distribution, or figure out how
Mandrake is handling their kernel builds, and send me a patch. Usually
they elect the first options, since it's usually the easist path; some
newbies will switch to Red Hat, though. I haven't had anyone take me up
on the third option.
- Ted
P.S. To be fair, it's not just Mandrake which does this. Red Hat does
this as well, and I cursed long and loud when I first had to deal with
it. It's just that there are enough Red Hat boxes that I had to support
them, and it was a lot easier since I had Red Hat systems easily within
reach, even though I normally don't use their stock kernels.
-
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