Re: ARM defconfig files

From: david
Date: Sat Jun 05 2010 - 23:53:57 EST


On Thu, 3 Jun 2010, Russell King wrote:

On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 11:20:30AM -0700, Daniel Walker wrote:
I don't see how we can do without defconfigs altogether tho. I mean , if
you want to run a Beagle board or a Nexus one we can't just give the
users a slim ARM config and let them troll through 1000's of drivers
trying to find just those ones that work on their given board.

Well, Linus does have a point - I can't start a new with Kconfig and
generate a working defconfig first time mainly because of the
thounds of options there.

What I can do is get the ARM side of the configuration right, since
for the majority of cases the only thing that needs doing is selecting
the platform class and the board itself.

The problem comes with driver configuration, where you have to go
through lots of menus to find all the drivers for the platform/SoC.
That's the tedious bit, and more often than not it takes several
attempts to get everything that's necessary.

Would the resulting kconfig files that Linus is proposing (or whatever else goes in) be stable enough across different kernel versions that the hardware vendors could create them when the hardware is created and make them available?

I'm not just thinking the ARM embedded space here, I'm also thinking things like laptops/notebooks which tend to have some unusual hardware as well. having a 'this is enough to see everything on the system' config would be a wonderful starting place to have.

David Lang
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