Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution)

Dave Jones
2002-01-14T21:10:42Z

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 03:38:44PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Right now, neither lsmod nor the boot time messages necessarily give you that
> information.

One of the great things about Linux (or at least I think so) kernel
is it's incredibly verbose startup.
If you have a configured network, boot messages WILL tell you
what driver is controlling that card. If built as a module
lsmod WILL tell you.

> /var/log/dmesg contains no message from the NIC on my motherboard.

Then that's a driver issue. What NIC ?

> And going from the driver to the config symbol isn't trivial even
> if you *have* the lsmod or dmesg information.

Then we need better descriptions in the CML2 rules.

> And anyway there are settings you can't even recover by looking at the
> hardware, such as whether KHTTPD or BSD process accounting were turned
> on.

ls /proc/sys/net/khttpd
ls /proc/sys/kernel/acct

> Sure, Melvin could remember a whole bunch of state, or a whole bunch
> of rules for reconstructing it. But isn't sweating that kind of detail
> exactly what *computers* are for?

If Melvin really does have a mind like a sieve,he'd put .config
somewhere sensible after building a kernel.

--
| Dave Jones. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs