On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:06:44AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Borislav Petkov <b...@amd64.org> wrote: > > > > Seriously, this helps only in the cases where the stuff the distro > > actually needs is in modules. So, there probably are obscure situations > > where you need to enable stuff which is bool and not M. > > Sadly, not obscure at all. > > Most of the *drivers* are modules, but most of the "distro config" > options are indeed booleans (or, if tristate, =y). > > Even driver-wise, there are some things that are often =y, even though > you generally don't want them.
Tell me about it. I'm always pissed off when someone thinks his stuff is very important and sets his sacred option to be =y/=m by default so the wider audience can at least compile-test it while the majority of the machines don't actually need it. A more coarse-grained config where most of the stuff is off by default could take care of that probably. > PCMCIA? Not even *laptops* have that shit any more, but having > built-in cardbus support almost certainly helps in a distro kernel for > booting of certain odder cases. Yeah, distros need the one-size-fits-all thing so they have to enable *everything*. > Xen support? Odd partition tables? All the different AGP versions? > Many of us couldn't care less, but again, it makes sense in the actual > distro kernel, even if it does *not* necessarily make sense in a > personalized one. Yep. > So doing "make allmodconfig" is certainly a workable thing (modulo the > modules that you need for stuff you hadn't happened to use), but it's > not wonderful. Oh and I always aim to build distro kernels on a big machine - allmodconfig build is no fun on a tiny laptop. So would it be better to have better profiled kernels, obviating the need for an almost full build? Hell yeah! > I also hate having to enable support for modules. A non-modular build > is quicker to build and avoids some security issues. Some drivers > don't work well built-in (they load firmware etc too early), but imho > it's worth doing if you can, and it's something we should make easy > for people to do because of the security side (of course, per-build > randomly generated keys and signed modules with the keys deleted after > the build would be reasonably equivalent from a security standpoint, > but we're not there yet). Agreed. So there are some not-so-obscure situations, judging by your examples above. Ho-humm. -- Regards/Gruss, Boris. Advanced Micro Devices GmbH Einsteinring 24, 85609 Dornach GM: Alberto Bozzo Reg: Dornach, Landkreis Muenchen HRB Nr. 43632 WEEE Registernr: 129 19551 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/