Subject: Re: [PATCH] build some drivers only when compile-testing

From: Rob Landley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 23:50:30 -0500

On 05/23/2013 09:01:40 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 19:23 -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:18:46AM +0200, Jiri Slaby wrote:
> > > Some drivers can be built on more platforms than they run on. This
> > > causes users and distributors packaging burden when they have to
> > > manually deselect some drivers from their allmodconfigs. Or  
> sometimes
> > > it is even impossible to disable the drivers without patching the
> > > kernel.
> > >
> > > Introduce a new config option COMPILE_TEST and make all those  
> drivers
> > > to depend on the platform they run on, or on the COMPILE_TEST  
> option.
> > > Now, when users/distributors choose COMPILE_TEST=n they will not  
> have
> > > the drivers in their allmodconfig setups, but developers still can
> > > compile-test them with COMPILE_TEST=y.
> >
> > I understand the urge, and it's getting hard for distros to handle  
> these
> > drivers that just don't work on other architectures, but it's really
> > valuable to ensure that they build properly, for those of us that  
> don't
> > have many/any cross compilers set up.

In http://landley.net/aboriginal/bin grab the cross-compiler-*.tar.bz2  
tarballs, extract them, add the "bin" subdirectory of each to the  
$PATH. Congratulations, you have cross compilers set up. (They're  
statically linked and relocatable, so should run just about anywhere.  
If they don't, let me know and I'll fix it.)

Example build:

   make ARCH=sparc sparc32_defconfig
   PATH=/home/landley/simple-cross-compiler-sparc/bin:$PATH \
     make ARCH=sparc CROSS_COMPILE=sparc-

Rob