On Sun, Apr 09, 2000 at 06:53:08PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> There really is not a whole lot preventing the "install" script
> on a driver cdrom from building the kernel module from source.
> It can even pop up a little "building driver module" dialogue
> with a cute little thermometer moving along as the thing builds
> itself. :-)
> The one thing preventing that would be if no compiler tools at
> all are installed on the user's machine. And that would be
> the one issue preventing this scheme from working.
I don't think that's an unreasonable requirement. Hopefully distribution
vendors would start including gcc, kernel headers, make, etc. as part of a
"typical" (i.e. "don't ask me any questions") installation, if this took off.
> It then would not matter if the user was using kernel-2.2.x from
> Debian, or Slackware, or whoever. It also would not matter if the
> person was running on a Sparc, a PPC, an Alpha, an x86, or whatever
> PCI based platform on which the card works.
>
> I mean, am I the only person for whom this strikes them as being
> desirable? :-)
It would be wonderful -- the only thing that needs to be done is to make
things a bit more friendly for building outside of the kernel source tree.
Dumping a Makefile (or makefile fragment) in /boot, or /usr/include/.., or
/lib/modules/.. on kernel installation would probably do the trick. If the
hardware vendor's drivers used that, then it would present a uniform
interface to vendor-specific GUI config tools.
-- "I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science." -- Donald E. Knuth, TAoCP vol 3- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 15 2000 - 21:00:13 EST