Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3394 mails)

[jpennington@xxxxxxxxx (Jon Pennington)]

On Sat, 04 Mar 2000, Philipp Thomas wrote:

> That definitely sounds neat ;-) But I don't think we'll offer that. We're on
> the contrary working to reduce the need for a self compiled kernel
> (possibly to zero). The reason is simply that we can't support kernels with
> unknown configuration (the possible number of permutations is
> unsupportable).

I understand fully.  I've been watching how the stock kernel has been growing,
and appreciate SuSE's policy and standpoint on the issue.  But as Tim "The Tool
Man" Taylor would say, "MORE POWER!"

> And a number of options aren't for the faint of heart (like write access to
> NTFS partitions), so even offering them would be placing a loaded gun in
> their hands.

Perhaps I should clarify my intent;  The network, file system, and other,
best-untouched options could be left out of the tuning process.  Perhaps the
script(s) would only change the hardware configuration to suit the needs of a
given PC.  The networking options would stay the same between all of the
kernels (not unlike they are now), but my Athlon at work would have a different
configuration from my K6-III PC at home where it counts.

Maybe an even better idea than that would be a script that would automatically
generate a hardware list, but it would be *totally* up to the user to see if
he/she wanted to enable the options.  A simple PERL script (I *say* that, but
have no idea when it comes to complexity) that would lspci and pnpdump, sort
the information, and add generic headers and footers like:

* We have detected the following hardware on your system:
    AMD Athlon(tm) Processor

We recommend the following options:
  Processor type and features  --->
    (Pentium/K6/TSC) Processor family

* We have detected the following hardware on your system:
    Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97]

We recommend the following options:
  Sound  --->
    <M> Sound card support
    <M> Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI 97 (ES1371)

* We have detected the following hardware on your system:
    VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL AGP

We recommend the following options:
  Processor type and features  --->
    [*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
  Character devices  --->
    <M> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support) (EXPERIMENTAL)
    [*]    AMD Irongate support
  
It could poll the item descriptions directly from the same files that
menuconfig does (as I have here, a la X buffer ;), and make it really easy. 
The complicated part would probably be having someone do the research to keep
track of all of the new hardware options, thier identifiers, and making sure
that the script knows what to do with them.


-- 
-=|JP|=-
Jon Pennington		|   Atipa Linux Solutions    -o)
jpennington@xxxxxxxxx	|   Kansas City, MO	     /\\
816-241-2641 x121	|   http://www.atipa.com    _\_V

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