Re: [BUG] New Kernel Bugs

Daniel Barkalow
2007-11-16T18:20:37Z

On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, Romano Giannetti wrote:

>
> (Cc: trimmed a bit).
>
> On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 11:19 -0500, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Theodore Tso wrote:
> [...]
> > > A full kernel build with everything selected can take good 30 minutes or
> > > more, and that's on a fast dual-core machine with 4gigs of memory and
> > > 7200rpm disk drives. On a slower, memory limited laptop, doing a single
> > > kernel build can take more time than the user has patiences; multiply
> > > that by 7 or 8 build and test boots, and it starts to get tiresome.
> >
> > None of this is going to take as long,
>
> Well, the compile phase can. Especially if the first time you try to
> compile the kernel with EXTRAVERSION=`git describe` which force almost a
> full rebuild every time...

Compared to getting useful suggestions from a mailing list, especially
before you've gotten anybody's attention? Hours or overnight isn't
particularly long, and doesn't take up much of your time if you've got a
working kernel to use while it's working.

> But the worst problem is that a full recompile, with a distro .config,
> will take hours on my 2.66GHz/CoreDuo/1G ram. Trimming down .config is
> fundamental to be able to bisect effectively, but it's not an easy thing
> to do for an unexperienced user (and a painful one for all the rest of
> us).
>
> What would be an invaluable help would be a tool that generates
> a .config with all the modules and subsystems I am using *now*. Should
> be possible in principle by parsing KConfig and Makefiles and using as
> input the current .config and lsmod... is it possible to map the kernel
> object name to the option enabling it?

I don't think there's anything set up for that, aside from the actual
build system generating it, and I don't know how hard that would be to
repurpose for generating a configuration.

-Daniel
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