Re: Can't build in the virtio console driver on x86_64 when the other virtio drivers are modular

On (Fri) 25 Feb 2011 [12:13:20], Chuck Ebbert wrote:

On Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:38:15 +0530
Amit Shah [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On (Thu) 24 Feb 2011 [11:28:19], Chuck Ebbert wrote:

quoted

The virtio configuration options are inconsistent. According to this,
every options that needs virtio will select it:

 # Virtio always gets selected by whoever wants it.
 config VIRTIO
        tristate

Note that it's not user-selectable, so any config file that tries to
set it will be ignored when kconfig loads those options. And yet we
have a whole set of options that depend on VIRTIO, like VIRTIO_CONSOLE
for example. This makes it impossible to have VIRTIO_PCI modular and
VIRTIO_CONSOLE built-in on x86_64, because:

Any reason to have VIRTIO_PCI modular instead of built in (on x86-64,
virtio-console won't work without virtio-pci anyway)?

None that I know of offhand, other than not building in things unless
absolutely necessary. There's no dependency of any kind there, so it's
even possible to build a kernel with VIRTIO_CONSOLE enabled and
VIRTIO_PCI completely disabled.

Yes, that's that way because not all architectures need virtio-pci to
have virtio-console functional (eg. s390, which doesn't have a PCI
bus).

So if you're only interested in the x86-64 arch, you could compile in
virtio-pci and virtio-console and this should happily work.

		Amit