The drivers Kconfig structure: oddities and exceptions

The drivers Kconfig structure: oddities and exceptions

[Robert P. J. Day]

  as a followup to my previous patch (and before i build on top of
that), perhaps someone can clarify some of these bits of curiosity:

1) although "Sound" is listed in the Device Drivers menu, its actual
source directory is at the top level of the kernel source tree, and
it's the *only* entry in Device Drivers that requires sourcing from
the top-level directory.  any reason for this?  it just kind of stands
out as a weird exception to the rule.


2) in any of these driver submenu Kconfig files, you normally see that
*all* of the Kconfig entries depend on that "parent" menu selection.
but in drivers/scsi/Kconfig, you read:

=========================================================
menu "SCSI device support"

config RAID_ATTRS                            ???
        tristate "RAID Transport Class"
        default n
        depends on BLOCK
        ---help---
          Provides RAID

config SCSI
        tristate "SCSI device support"
        depends on BLOCK
        ---help---
          ... snip ...

config SCSI_TGT
        tristate "SCSI target support"
        depends on SCSI && EXPERIMENTAL
        ---help---
          ... snip ...

config SCSI_NETLINK                           ???
        bool
        default n
        select NET
...
==========================================================

  one would think that, if RAID_ATTRS depends only on BLOCK, it
properly belongs under the "Block devices" menu, just as SCSI_NETLINK
might belong under NET, or perhaps it should have a SCSI dependency as
well to make it consistent.  thoughts?

rday

Re: The drivers Kconfig structure: oddities and exceptions

[Randy Dunlap]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2006 04:36:25 -0500 (EST) Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> 
>   as a followup to my previous patch (and before i build on top of
> that), perhaps someone can clarify some of these bits of curiosity:
> 
> 1) although "Sound" is listed in the Device Drivers menu, its actual
> source directory is at the top level of the kernel source tree, and
> it's the *only* entry in Device Drivers that requires sourcing from
> the top-level directory.  any reason for this?  it just kind of stands
> out as a weird exception to the rule.

sound/ (ALSA) was a replacement for the OSS sound drivers and
needed a different directory to live/work in, that's all.
They are still Device Drivers.  Don't get hung up on where
the directory is.

(part 2 omitted)

---
~Randy