[ILUG] Multi-arch. kernel sources

[Niall O Broin]

On Sun, May 21, 2000 at 04:16:49AM +0100, Paul Kelly wrote:

> To be fair, there's a large body of platform-specific code and
> documentation outside of the arch directories. Things like
> drivers/{acorn,nubus,sbus,sgi,s390}. I haven't counted, but at a guess
> I'd say it's at least as much again on top of your figures.

It's not - nowhere near as much - the biggest architecture specific one is
acorn which is < 100K in bzip2 form. But you've probably hit the nail on the
head indirectly - there are of course other architecture specific files in
various places, I'm sure (e.g. in the first place I look, net/atari*) and at
a conceptual level, if the kernel sources were to be broken up into generic
and architecture specific parts, this should be total, and it would be more
difficult to do than just separating out arch/*. However, I still think it
would be a useful thing for me as a poor modem user, even if not A Good
Thing from a philosophic point of view. I'm pretty sure that this is the
main point i.e. that there have been many branched ports of Linux, the
latest being the S390, but the successful ones have always been merged back
into the mainstream tree. RSN I'll have several terabits/sec into my house
for 2 roubles/fortnight thanks to Genesis (hi Lucky and all you other
emigrants to Cork) so I won't care any more :-)

> But I do (sic - he meant don't :-) agree with your point. What's more,
> de-merging the kernel would  lead to more newbie problems. It's hard enough
> for them to handle a  single source archive as it stands. 

This is a completely specious argument. Almost by definition, if you're not
capable of dealing with a kernel source archive in one or multiple files,
you shouldn't be attempting to recompile your kernel. This may not have been
the case in the past before distributions shipped with small modular kernels
but there's very little reason for a newbie now to need to recompile a kernel.




Regards,



Niall