Re: Monster switch for small size (was Linux-tiny revival)

Rob Landley
2007-09-20T20:41:41Z

On Thursday 20 September 2007 12:10:50 pm Tim Bird wrote:
> Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> > Knowing nothing about these options, from a test perspective it would
> > be nice if we were able to simply enable "the lot" so we can do "normal"
> > -mm runs and "tiny" -mm runs without any manual intervention?
>
> I agree completely.
>
> I have been thinking for a while about how to make a "monster switch"
> (the kind they always seem to have in Frankenstein movies) that
> switches a whole bunch of settings at once. We currently have methods
> in the kernel for:
> * default (or recommended) config for a particular platform
> * all yes - to build as much as possible
> * all no - to build as little as possible
>
> The problem with "allno" is that it rarely produces a usable
> kernel.

Beyond that, allno doesn't come close to switching everything off.

1) You have to _enable_ CONFIG_EMBEDDED in order to go into that menu and
switch _off_ the stuff in there.

2) The stuff CONFIG_EMBEDDED reveals isn't all in that menu. CONFIG_BLOCK is
at the top level menu. CONFIG_VT and CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS are buried down
under device drivers->character devices, and there's more sprinkled all over.
You have to track it all down and switch it off to get an _actual_
allnoconfig kernel.

(I cut the bit where you reinvent miniconfig. People keep doing this. I dig
it up and resubmit it every year or so, so Roman Zippel can shoot it down
again. Meanwhile, not only is Firmware Linux happily using it, but I even
wrote more documentation at
http://landley.net/code/firmware/new_platform.html although you have to
scroll down a bit to get to the stuff about miniconfig...)

Rob
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.