On 07/13/2012 10:37 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
So this has long been one of my pet configuration peeves: as a user I am perfectly happy answering the questions about what kinds of hardware I want the kernel to support (I kind of know that), but many of the "support infrastructure" questions are very opaque, and I have no idea which of the them any particular distribution actually depends on.
And it tends to change over time. For example, F14 (iirc) started using TMPFS and TMPFS_POSIX_ACL/XATTR for /dev. And starting in F16, the initrd setup requires DEVTMPFS and DEVTMPFS_MOUNT. There's been several times when I started with my old minimal config, and the resulting kernel would boot, but something wouldn't quite work right, and it can be very subtle indeed.
Similarly, the distro ends up having very particular requirements for exactly *which* security models it uses and needs, and they tend to change over time. And now with systemd, CGROUPS suddenly aren't just esoteric things that no normal person would want to use, but are used for basic infrastructure. And I remember being surprised by OpenSUSE suddenly needing the RAW table support for netfilter, because it had a NOTRACK rule or something.
The point I'm slowly getting to is that I would actually love to have *distro* Kconfig-files, where the distribution would be able to say "These are the minimums I *require* to work". So we'd have a "Distro" submenu, where you could pick the distro(s) you use, and then pick which release, and we'd have something like
- distro/Kconfig:
config DISTRO_REQUIREMENTS bool "Pick minimal distribution requirements"
choice DISTRO prompt "Distribution" depends on DISTRO_REQUIREMENTS
config FEDORA config OPENSUSE config UBUNTU ...
endchoice
and then depending on the DISTRO config, we'd include one of the distro-specific ones with lists of supported distro versions and then the random config settings for that version:
- distro/Kconfig.suse:
config OPENSUSE_121 select OPENSUSE_11 select IP_NF_RAW # ..
- distro/Kconfig.Fedora:
config FEDORA_16 select FEDORA_15 select DEVTMPFS # F16 initrd needs this select DEVTMPFS_MOUNT # .. and expects the kernel to mount DEVTMPFS automatically ...
config FEDORA_17 select FEDORA_16 select CGROUP_xyzzy ...
Could this be made more dynamic? I would like to download a minimal config file from my distro's website and perhaps add my own minimal config for the hardware I own and put both downloads somewhere in my local tree, or have makemenuconfig ask me for a location of my minimal config files? -- Hans -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org