Re: [RFC] scripts: add gen-linux-conf for remote kernel configuration

[Alan Jenkins <sourcejedi.lkml@googlemail.com>]

On 11/12/09, Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com> wrote:
> The new 'make localmodconfig' proves very useful but on low end
> systems we do not want to 'git clone' an entire kernel tree or
> download a whole kernel but just cross compile the kernel on a
> bigger machine. The .config generated with 'make localmodconfig'
> is still very helpfup though so to aid users and developers
> with that add a script which builds a tarball with only the
> necessary kernel glue stuff to be able to generate a local
> minimum kernel configuration with 'make localmodconfig'.
>
> With this you can copy to your target device a relatively
> small tarball (1.2 MB currenty) and, allows you to modify
> the kernel config for your tree (mconf, conf, etc) and
> finally run 'make localmodconfig'.
>
> Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com>
> ---
>
> I had an itch to scratch and that was to use 'localmodconfig'
> on a small netbook but I didn't want to clone a whole tree
> or even compile an entire kernel on it. This did the trick,
> thought others might find it useful.
>
> A little grimy the bash script, but hey it works and its simple
> enough. I tried to reduce the Makefile count to only arch/ but
> found that that didn't do the trick. Perhaps this can be optimized
> more, suggestions welcomed. Maybe it should be written in Go :)
>
> What would be *real* nice is to give an IP address of a box and
> have it build and fetch a localmodconfig .config for you.
>
>   Luis

Thanks for posting this.

When I tried this for my netbook, my approach was to copy
/proc/modules and /boot/config from the netbook.  As a shameless hack,
I temporarily bind mounted /proc/modules on the build system.  I guess
the cleaner way would be to copy the result of "lsmod", and have
localmodconfig accept "LSMOD_FILE=file".

Naturally I think my approach is simpler, despite not having actually
implemented it properly :).  What do you think about it?

Regards
Alan