How to Avoid "make dep" [ANSWER]

Paul Gortmaker (gpg109@rsphy1.anu.edu.au)
Sat, 16 Mar 1996 13:42:27 +1100 (EST)

Evidently if you start from a clean tree, and if you don't really care
about patching/recompiling that same tree later, then as many have noted,
the "make dep" doesn't buy you anything. In fact, if you are on a
clapped out old 386 with low mem, it can be quite painful. B-)

A lot of people aren't aware of the fact that you can "cheat" so to
speak, by substituting "touch .depend" for "make depend". Some of us
have been doing this for a long time. However you can't do this with the
1.3.x kernels, as "make dep" also includes compiling and generating the
consolemap hash table which IMHO should be done in the make zImage, and
not in the depend step.

This 2 line patch moves that process to the "make zImage" step, and
allows you to "cheat" via. "touch .depend" like you would in the older
v1.2.x kernels. As an added bonus, you can then nuke unused drivers and
filesystems with no ill effects, if you are tight on disk space, i.e.

# rm -rf drivers/scsi drivers/sound fs/isofs fs/xiafs fs/ext fs/minix ...

[[ You can also nuke the non i386 dirs in ./arch and ./include/asm-*
to save a fair bit of space, if you are really low on disk space. ]]

Anyway, here is the patch.

Paul.

--- linux/drivers/char/Makefile.old Fri Mar 15 16:36:42 1996
+++ linux/drivers/char/Makefile Fri Mar 15 17:04:25 1996
@@ -157,9 +157,7 @@

include $(TOPDIR)/Rules.make

-fastdep: uni_hash.tbl
-
-consolemap.o:
+consolemap.o: uni_hash.tbl

conmakehash: conmakehash.c
$(HOSTCC) -o conmakehash conmakehash.c