Re: aty128fb

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 22:58 -0700, Michael wrote:

> Ok, ben, I am slightly beyond a newbie, but not that far. Ummm, where to 
> start.  I have never used make oldconfig, didn't understand the manual 
> page on zcat.  Ok the process I have used is
> 1) Get source
> 2) Untar Source
> 3) make menuconfig
> 4) configure it

Ok, don't go that way, you'll get lost in the gazillion of config
options and may get something wrong :) When you configure the kernel, it
produces an invisible file ".config" at the root of the kernel tree,
plus does a few other things. make "oldconfig" basically takes
whatever .config file is there, validates it against the current sources
(like it asks you for any new options that wasn't there yet) and does
those "other things". So when you just copy a config file from
somewhere, you typically do "make oldconfig" before compiling.

Now, zcat is just like "cat", that is, it displays a file, but the "z"
here means that it displays a file in gzip format (it uncompresses it on
the fly).

Unless that was specifically disabled in debian kernels, recent 2.6 have
their ".config" built-in and are exposing it as a gzip file
in /proc/config.gz. So doing zcat /proc/config.gz will "dump"
the .config of the currently running kernel. Doing zcat /proc/config.gz
>.config will make a file ".config" from the decompression
of /proc/config.gz... 
 
> 5) make-kpkg --revision=blah --append_to_version=blah kernel-image
> I do get ya on the debian kernel config thing, first kernel I compiled 
> 2.6.11.6 I used the config file for  2.6.8-powerpc that's in the /boot 
> directory.

Oh well, I never use make-kpkg ... I use do "make" from the kernel tree.
make-kpkg and friends are annoying for several reasons: first, they make
packages :) I don't care about packages. I build kernels myself and copy
the resulting kernel file to /boot manually and then edit yaboot.conf to
point to it :) The other annoying thing with make kpkg is that it
"cleans" the source tree every time. That is, every time, you haev to do
a _full_ build of the kernel, which is annoying when you just changed 2
lines of code...
 
> Oh and hacking at it, you'll have to hold my hand :)

Sure.

Ben.