Re: How do we handle autoconfiguration?

Kai Henningsen
2000-12-27T11:18:29Z

[CC: list drastically trimmed]

esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) wrote on 26.12.00 in <200012262313.eBQNDBi07719@snark.thyrsus.com>:

> Linus, replying to Alan:
> >> If we do that I'd rather see a make autoconfig that does the lot from
> >> proc/pci etc 8)
> >
> >Good point. No point in adding a new config option, we should just have a
> >new configurator instead. Of course, it can't handle many of the
> >questions, so it would still have to fall back on asking.

> My original design for CML2 included a way to capture the results from
> arbitrary procedural probes written in C or some scripting language
> and use them in predicates. Imagine something like this:
>
> # PROCESSOR is string valued; we capture stdout from the probe
> derive PROCESSOR from "myprobe1.sh"

I hope that design wouldn't mean that you can't configure a kernel on a
machine different from the one supposed to run it, nor that you can't
gather the autoconfiguration info on a machine where you won't build the
kernel and don't have the full kernel sources.

Because that's a rather common situation in nontrivial installations.

MfG Kai