Re: Please fix x86 defconfig regression

From: Rafael J. Wysocki
Date: Thu Aug 07 2008 - 16:44:28 EST


On Wednesday, 6 of August 2008, Andi Kleen wrote:
>
> commit 5cb04df8d3f03e37a19f2502591a84156be71772
> Author: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>
> Date: Sun May 4 19:49:04 2008 +0200
>
> x86: defconfig updates
>
> refresh 32-bit defconfig too, and update the 64-bit configs as well,
> the defconfig should be much more useful by default, so most of the
> updates are the enabling of various options.
>
> updates the x86 defconfigs. Unfortunately contrary to its description
> it disables lots of important options:
>
> including NFS and NFS root support
>
> -CONFIG_IP_PNP=y
> -CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP=y
> -# CONFIG_IP_PNP_BOOTP is not set
> -# CONFIG_IP_PNP_RARP is not set
>
> and disabling even common ethernet drivers like
>
> -CONFIG_8139CP=y
> +# CONFIG_8139CP is not set
> -CONFIG_B44=y
> -CONFIG_TULIP=y
> -CONFIG_E1000E=y
> -CONFIG_E1000E_ENABLED=y
> -CONFIG_BNX2=y
>
> and worst completely disabling NFS
>
> +# CONFIG_NFS_FS is not set
> +# CONFIG_NFSD is not set
>
> These changes broke my test setup completely.
>
> Also it has a few other questionable changes like:
>
> -CONFIG_X86_GENERICARCH=y
> +# CONFIG_X86_GENERICARCH is not set
> -CONFIG_X86_GENERIC=y
>
> which means it won't run on old CPUs anymore.
> Where should GENERICARCH/X86_GENERIC not be set but in a defconfig?
>
> And the IDE change will likely break lots of boot setups:
>
> -CONFIG_IDE=y
> -CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y
>
> because the root device name will change suddenly and many distros
> or initrd less setups cannot deal with that.
>
> Also undoubtedly that will also break people's system (reiserfs
> is still widely used):
>
> -CONFIG_REISERFS_FS=y
> -# CONFIG_REISERFS_CHECK is not set
> -# CONFIG_REISERFS_PROC_INFO is not set
>
> This breaks reading a lot of joliet and vfat file systems:
>
> -CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15=y
> +# CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15 is not set
>
> This breaks older glibc userland (shipped in at least one SUSE
> distribution release):
>
> +# CONFIG_COMPAT_VDSO is not set
>
> This will break a lot of older server systems:
>
> -CONFIG_SCSI_AIC7XXX=y
>
> Various other issues.
>
> Rafael, can you please add all that to the regression list? Thanks.

I would, but it didn't make it to any list archives I know of, so there's no
link to put in there. I'll link it to my reply if that's available somewhere.

> In general defconfig should only add things, but very rarely
> remove any. The best would be probably to revert that commit and
> redo whatever options it wanted to add on top of the previous
> defconfigs.

Thanks,
Rafael
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