a question about building driver

a question about building driver

[Zhi Li]

Hi list,

I'm maintaining a little linux distribution. Sometimes users need to
build specific drivers for their machine. But they do not want the
whole linux kernel source which I used to make my linux distribution,
for they think it eats up too much disk and network bandwith. So, my
question is whether there's a way to give them partial kernel source
to build the needed driver module.

Thanks
Zhi

Re: a question about building driver

[Randy Dunlap]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:13:15 +0800 Zhi Li wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I'm maintaining a little linux distribution. Sometimes users need to
> build specific drivers for their machine. But they do not want the
> whole linux kernel source which I used to make my linux distribution,
> for they think it eats up too much disk and network bandwith. So, my
> question is whether there's a way to give them partial kernel source
> to build the needed driver module.

We don't support any kind of partial kernel source tree infrastructure per se.

If your distro has a kernel-headers package (or kernel-devel or whatever
you want to call it), you could create source packages of individual drivers
and then use the external (out-of-tree) driver build methodology to build them.
(see Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt)

Building them should be the easy part.  Deciding which ones to package for
the users (or packaging hundreds of them) could be a never-ending job.

Or you could look at using something like the SuSE build service:
  https://build.opensuse.org/

---
~Randy