Upstream Linux 6.11 Makes It Easy To Build A Pacman Kernel Package For Arch Linux

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel is making it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and other Arch derived distributions relying on Pacman.

Merged to the mainline Linux Git codebase is support for the "make pacman-pkg" target for generating a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and its derivatives.

The work was led by Linux developer Thomas Weißschuh to make it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel from the upstream sources. With the "make pacman-pkg" build its possible to create native packages from the kernel tree with the package properly configuring the initramfs generation and bootloader configuration, better uninstall handling, and new user-space API headers can be installed without any manual tasks. The generated PKGBUILD file for the kernel is modified from the downstream Arch Linux "linux" kernel package.

This "make pacman-pkg" support for the Linux kernel has been through a number of rounds of review but now ready for the mainline kernel.

The support was merged as part of the Kbuild updates for Linux 6.11. That pull request also removed the tristate choice from the Kconfig file, warning fixes for RPM package builds, and various other updates.