Re: stripping down the kernel-parameters.txt file

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com>]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, David Newall wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > if the goal is to simply put all of the basic boot-time kernel parms
> > along with the module-specific ones into a single file, sorted in
> > alphabetical order, then i contend that this is, in fact, "silly".
>
> Or even, "messy".  There's no doubt that it should be maintained
> with care; perhaps it would if the people who write the code for
> each parameter also update the documentation.

  or (and here's a wild and crazy idea) what about writing a utility
that auto-generates all that information?

  the biggest hassle in keeping all the documentation up to date is
that much of it is being stored in a manually-updated text file
(MAINTAINERS leaps to mind), so *of course* it's always going to be
out of date.  so why not just fix it so it's auto-generated, the same
way the in-kernel nano-doc stuff is?

  surely, it wouldn't be that hard, at least for the basic parms.  a
combination of egrep, sed and sort would certainly give you the basic
parms.  off the top of my head:

$ egrep '(__setup|early_param)' $(find . -name *.c) | \
> sed -e 's/.*"\(.*\)".*/\1/' | \
> sort -u
$

  of course that's not sufficient, but it took me all of two minutes.
would it be that much work to extend it and deal with once and for
all?

rday
-- 
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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