One other thing I'd like to see is a message on booting which says
"SMP architecture not found" if you run an SMP kernel on a single-CPU box.
Otherwise people may never know that they're running an SMP kernel when they
didn't mean to. I submitted a patch many moons ago, and will do so again after
2.1.55 is out (pre-55-1 has modifications to exactly the code I want to change)
If the objection to the Makefile changes is that more files will depend on
config.h and hence get recompiled more often than they do at the moment, I
agree with Michael that they aren't really that much of a problem; after all -
there's lots of files which get recompiled unnecessarily anyway, so a few more
is just pi^H^Hurinating in the wind.
What I'd like to see, in fact, is a new approach to the dependencies - if a
file includes config.h, then don't just recompile it if config.h is modified -
only recompile it if the #defines that it uses are changed. We could define
each CONFIG_xxx option in autoconf.h with the date and time that it was set,
rather than just defining it to 1. So autoconf.h becomes:
#undef CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION 19970909102900
#define CONFIG_NET 19970909102900
etc...
Then the dependency checking involves scanning the source file (& included
headers) for references to CONFIG_xxxx options, and marking it in need of
recompilation iff the change time of any of the used options is later than the
stamp of the object file.
This will make the dependency checking more complex, hence slower, but will
mean that we no longer need to recompile the whole kernel when only one option
is changed.
I'm not even sure if what I'm suggesting is possible, but if so, and if people
like the idea, I'm happy to look into implementing it (although possibly next
month after I finish here and go back to College, where I'm not paid, so can
work on what I like).
My initial thought was to separate each CONFIG_ option into a separate file,
and that source files should only include the files for the options they
depended on:
#include <linux/config/config_arcnet.h>
#ifdef CONFIG_ARCNET
etc...
I don't like this because it means an explosion of small files in the
linux/config directory, which will waste a lot of space on some filesystems,
and generally not look nice, but it's a simple way of implementing finer
grained dependencies without overhauling the dependency code.
Comments, flames, abuse, money orders, etc. are as usual welcome.
-- David Woodhouse, CB3 9AN http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk/ dwmw2@cam.ac.uk Tel: 0976 658355 D.W.Woodhouse@nortel.co.uk Tel: 01279 402332