Re: [PATCH] build some drivers only when compile-testing

On 05/23/2013 09:01:40 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote:

On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 19:23 -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

quoted

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:18:46AM +0200, Jiri Slaby wrote:

quoted

Some drivers can be built on more platforms than they run on. This
causes users and distributors packaging burden when they have to
manually deselect some drivers from their allmodconfigs. Or sometimes
it is even impossible to disable the drivers without patching the
kernel.

Introduce a new config option COMPILE_TEST and make all those drivers
to depend on the platform they run on, or on the COMPILE_TEST option.
Now, when users/distributors choose COMPILE_TEST=n they will not have
the drivers in their allmodconfig setups, but developers still can
compile-test them with COMPILE_TEST=y.

I understand the urge, and it's getting hard for distros to handle these
drivers that just don't work on other architectures, but it's really
valuable to ensure that they build properly, for those of us that don't
have many/any cross compilers set up.

In http://landley.net/aboriginal/bin grab the cross-compiler-*.tar.bz2 tarballs, extract them, add the "bin" subdirectory of each to the $PATH. Congratulations, you have cross compilers set up. (They're statically linked and relocatable, so should run just about anywhere. If they don't, let me know and I'll fix it.)

Example build:

  make ARCH=sparc sparc32_defconfig
  PATH=/home/landley/simple-cross-compiler-sparc/bin:$PATH \
    make ARCH=sparc CROSS_COMPILE=sparc-

Rob