Re: kms in defconfig

From: david
Date: Tue Apr 28 2009 - 13:27:24 EST

On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, david@xxxxxxx wrote:

as a end-user creating my own configs, I use the defaults as a guide to
understand when something moves from "we think it's a good idea" to "things
really need this"

I'm not talking about the defaults in the Kconfig files themselves, I'm
talking about the millions of "*_defconfig" files that have tons of random
default values.

Ok, I misunderstood.

If a tool was available to detect the hardware and create a config tailored
for the box, this use for a default config would go away

Yeah, I've wished for that.

Although I personally don't find that the actual hardware to be the
biggest issue (since there are usually just a few options for that, and
they are mostly not confusing). Instead, it's the issues about knowing
which software components (netfilter, filesystems, auditing, POSIX ACL's)
that you really want.

yes and no, getting a config that will boot on your system can sometimes be 'interesting' (mapping hardware -> config option for example), but should be able to be automated.

the other items that you mention (netfilter, etc) are actually the easier ones to deal with (you know what you want), and also the place where it's impossible to detect what's wanted.

It tends to be easy to just enable them all, but if you want a nice
efficient build, that's very much against the point.

So having some kind of (probably inevitably fairly complex) script that
you could run to get a config would be good. The problem is that the
script would need to be distributed with the kernel, yet it would often
also have some nasty distro issues.

I've seen people talk about creating such tools, but the responses that I've seen have tended to discourage them.

David Lang
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