Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

From: Randy Dunlap
Date: Fri Feb 15 2008 - 19:27:45 EST


Russell King wrote:
On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 03:47:24PM -0800, Randy Dunlap wrote:
On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:37:32 -0800 Andrew Morton wrote:
I wonder why I didn't see any of this - I build arm allmodconfig at least
once a week, usually more frequently.

Basically, you don't build any of the PXA platforms, which is what was
affected.

So either the offending patches weren't in my pile or arm allmodconfig is
worse than I thought :(

It really is in arch maintainers' best interest to keep their allmodconfig
in good shape, for this reason. arm's _isn't_ in good shape: the compile
fails for several long-standing reasons (eg: no hope of building DRM) and I
don't think the coverage is very broad either.
I think that Russell has said that allmodconfig isn't very realistic
for ARM, with its 70+ config files. Nevertheless, having a usable
allmodconfig would be very helpful.

Which is quite impossible. I've said all along that all*config is bad
news for ARM and folk haven't listened.

allmodconfig can (and does) work on some platform configurations such as
the one Andrew builds - which will be based on the Versatile platform.
However, that doesn't get _any_ of the PXA SoC drivers scattered throughout
the tree, the PXA SoC support in arch/arm/mach-pxa, none of the PXA platform
support files.

If you built an allmodconfig PXA configuration, you'd get those, but you
wouldn't get the OMAP SoC drivers, nor the ARM Primecell drivers found on
ARMs Integrator, Versatile and Realview platforms and the Cirrus EP93xx
SoCs. Nor the Atmel AT91 drivers... and so the list goes on.

Each family of platforms are, unfortunately, quite distinct from each
other.


Does that mean that an artificial allarmconfig can't be made to build?
We clearly don't care whether it can boot or work, but we would just as
clearly like to be able to build more ARM stuff without N (N > 10) configs.

--
~Randy
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