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authorRoland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>2010-07-29 19:24:43 -0700
committerRoland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>2010-07-29 19:24:43 -0700
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+ Kernel package tips & tricks.
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The kernel is one of the more complicated packages in the distro, and
+for the newcomer, some of the voodoo in the spec file can be somewhat scary.
+This file attempts to document some of the magic.
+
+
+Speeding up make prep
+---------------------
+The kernel is nearly 500MB of source code, and as such, 'make prep'
+takes a while. The spec file employs some trickery so that repeated
+invocations of make prep don't take as long. Ordinarily the %prep
+phase of a package will delete the tree it is about to untar/patch.
+The kernel %prep keeps around an unpatched version of the tree,
+and makes a symlink tree clone of that clean tree and than applies
+the patches listed in the spec to the symlink tree.
+This makes a huge difference if you're doing multiple make preps a day.
+As an added bonus, doing a diff between the clean tree and the symlink
+tree is slightly faster than it would be doing two proper copies of the tree.
+
+
+build logs.
+-----------
+There's a convenience helper script in scripts/grab-logs.sh
+that will grab the build logs from koji for the kernel version reported
+by make verrel
+
+
+config heirarchy.
+-----------------
+Instead of having to maintain a config file for every arch variant we build on,
+the kernel spec uses a nested system of configs. At the top level, is
+config-generic. Add options here that should be present in every possible
+config on all architectures.
+Beneath this are per-arch overrides. For example config-x86-generic add
+additional x86 specific options, and also _override_ any options that were
+set in config-generic.
+There exist two additional overrides, config-debug, and config-nodebug,
+which override -generic, and the per-arch overrides. It is documented
+further below.
+
+debug options.
+--------------
+This is a little complicated, as the purpose & meaning of this changes
+depending on where we are in the release cycle.
+If we are building for a current stable release, 'make release' has
+typically been run already, which sets up the following..
+- Two builds occur, a 'kernel' and a 'kernel-debug' flavor.
+- kernel-debug will get various heavyweight debugging options like
+ lockdep etc turned on.
+
+If we are building for rawhide, 'make debug' has been run, which changes
+the status quo to:
+- We only build one kernel 'kernel'
+- The debug options from 'config-debug' are always turned on.
+This is done to increase coverage testing, as not many people actually
+run kernel-debug.
+
+To add new debug options, add an option to _both_ config-debug and config-nodebug,
+and also new stanzas to the Makefile 'debug' and 'release' targets.
+
+Sometimes debug options get added to config-generic, or per-arch overrides
+instead of config-[no]debug. In this instance, the options should have no
+discernable performance impact, otherwise they belong in the debug files.
+