Re: attached an ugly and hacky patch which allows me to build 2.6.15 on powerpc.

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Mon, Dec 26, 2005 at 10:53:41PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 21:25:15 +0100, Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> said: 
> 
> > hi Manoj, about this issue, i attach a quick and dirty patch, which
> > at least pinpoints the two places where we have an issue on
> > powerpc. The main point is that on powerpc the debian arch is
> > 'powerpc', while the kernel arch can be either ppc, ppc64 or
> > powerpc, depending on the version and the choices made.
> 
>         I am not sure I follow what you think debian arch is. There is
>  the architecture variable that kernel-package uses, that is set based
>  on DEB_HOST_ARCH_CPU (or, if that does not exist, DEB_HOST_GNU_CPU).
> 
>         Telling make-kpkg something that does not match using --arch
>  is likely to cause problems, as you found out.

Obviously this is the cause of the problem, --arch is not usefull for setting
the kernel ARCH variable, only used internally to do debian magic and
packaging.

> > The first hunk of this patch sets ARCH=ppc again for 32bit, i am not
> > sure i will be going this way or not finally, since upstream
> > recomends me to go with ARCH=powerpc on 32bit only for 2.6.16 and
> > later.
> 
>         You are talking about KERNEL_ARCH. Sure, you are the domain
>  expert about what the value for KERNEL_ARCH  should be for all sub
>  architectures for the DEB_HOST_ARCH_CPU==powerpc.

Indeed, and we need a way to be able to specify to kernel-package what the
KERNEL_ARCH is supposed to be, it is clear now that --arch is not used for
this, so i would recomend the creation of a --kernel-arch option to make-kpkg,
which will allow to set KERNEL_ARCH, and allow to override whatever default we
did set in the (ppc|ppc64|powerpc).mk snipplets. This is i believe the missing
bit here. Altough i would prefer a real option, is it possible that setting
the KERNEL_ARCH env var will solve this issue, but will it properly override
the (ppc|ppc64|powerpc).mk snipplets default ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther