Re: State of the new config & build system

Alexander Viro
2002-01-03T21:31:25Z

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Keith Owens wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 15:35:19 -0500 (EST),
> Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> wrote:
> >On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Dave Jones wrote:
> >> And being able to NFS share 1 kernel tree, and be able to do parallel
> >> builds on multiple boxes without having to wait until 1 is finished.
> >
> > Sigh... As soon as we get to prototype change in
> >getattr()/setattr()/permission() - we get CoW fs. I.e. equivalent of
> >*BSD unionfs. I hope to get around to that stuff around 2.5.4 or so.
>
> Unionfs and cow fs will be nice but kernel build will not use it.
> Users can build a Linux kernel on other operating systems, including
> Solaris, Irix, Cygwin etc. kbuild requires a Posix compliant fs and
> GNU tools, but it must not use additional fs features that only exist
> on Linux or only on specific versions of Linux.

<shrug> kernel build doesn't have to use it - if I mount a writable layer
atop of the clean tree and build in the resulting tree, build system
doesn't need to have any idea of that fact. That's the point - you are
emulating the thing that is generally useful and belongs to different
layer - namely, the kernel.