Re: [PATCH v1 00/10] tools: Introduce a kernel configuration checker

[Julian Braha]

On 11/9/26 15:49, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:
> Hi Julian,
> 
> On Sun, 08 Nov 2026, Julian Braha wrote:
>> Cool tool 🙂
>>
> Thanks!
> 
>>> If no ruleset is specified, the target prints the available rulesets:
>>>
>>>     $ make checkconfig
>>>       Usage: make RULES=<profile> [OVERLAY=<overlay>] checkconfig
>>>       Available RULES: preempt_rt
>>>
>>> The overlay mechanism allows distributions, CI systems, and Board Support
>> On the topic of distributions, this seems *a lot* like Canonical's
>> Annotations [1], albeit yours uses YAML and supports matching option
>> names with regex.
> The difference is not only in the implementation details. Please see below.
> 
>> As you say about PREEMPT_RT configuration not being
>> "one-size-fits-all", similarly there are 100+ Ubuntu kernels that need
>> to adhere to a configuration "policy".
>>
>> So this seems to be a real problem that others are having.
>>
> Kernel configuration is definitely getting trickier.  That's why I've
> contributed the PREEMPT_RT kernel configuration guide earlier:
> 
>    https://docs.kernel.org/core-api/real-time/kernel-configuration.html
> 
> Regarding the Canonical tool, it's the first time I see it.  From that
> announce e-mail, it seems that they're using it for generating a .config:
> 
>    Starting with 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), Ubuntu kernels are now using
>    only annotations to /generate/ their corresponding .config.
> 
>    ...
> 
>    $ ./debian/scripts/misc/annotations --arch amd64 --flavour generic > .config
> 
> Yocto also provides a very light concept of .config generation:
> 
>    https://docs.yoctoproject.org/kernel-dev/common.html#creating-
> configuration-fragments
> 
> But this tool does not conern itself with generation.  That is, Canonical
> can use this tool to validate that they've generated the right thing! 😉

Yeah, Annotations also supports generation with --export.

But it does support validating a config with a policy using --check [1]

Anyway, the point was to provide context for the maintainers that this
problem is bigger than PREEMPT_RT. I want to see this functionality /
your tool in upstream.

[1]
https://git.launchpad.net/~arighi/+git/annotations-tools/tree/kconfig/run.py?h=main#n117

- Julian Braha

Attachment: OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature