Re: [RFC PATCH 00/23] arm: defconfigs: use kconfig fragments

Arnd Bergmann
2016-12-07T21:36:27Z

On Wednesday, December 7, 2016 1:14:02 PM CET Olof Johansson wrote:
> >
> > - A "debug" fragment would be nice, to turn on common options that
> > add a lot of useful runtime checks at the expense of performance
> > or code size.
>
> Hmm, some of these might work but several useful debug options (in
> particular DEBUG_LL for early errors) are per-system/platform.

I was thinking mostly of architecture-independent options, i.e.
the stuff that is in lib/Kconfig.debug but isn't too expensive
to be run in a regular test environment. Enabling those
for a build/boot automation environment would be particularly
useful as you'd catch more bugs that get introduced through
a random patch.

> > - A "distro" fragment that turns on all loadable modules that are
> > enabled by common distributions (e.g. two or more of
> > debian/fedora/opensuse/gentoo), to let you build a drop-in
> > replacement kernel for a shipping distro. This would also allow
> > the distros to strip their own config files and just specify
> > whatever differs from the others.
>
> Keeping this in sync with the distro kernel could be a bit awkward
> (and possibly churny).

It would certainly need buy-in from distro maintainers. I've discussed
this with Laura Abbott in the past, and she was interested in
principle.

Arnd