Linux 6.6 Bringing Qt6 Port To "make xconfig" Interface

Masahiro Yamada submitted today all of the Kconfig feature updates targeting the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the Kconfig work is the "make xconfig" GUI seeing a port for Qt6 toolkit compatibility.

Developer Boris Kolpackov ported Linux's "make xconfig" graphical user-interface for managing the kernel configuration to Qt6. The Qt5 toolkit compatibility is retained -- at least as far as Qt 5.15 LTS is concerned. Prior Qt5 versions are no longer verified/tested. But at least with a few dozen lines of changes to the Kconfig code, "make xconfig" can now be built for Qt 5.15 LTS or in the Qt6 world has been verified to work with Qt 6.4.

The Qt6 port of "make xconfig" is a straight-forward port to adjust the API use where needed and doesn't overhaul the UI or make any other drastic changes. In any event a nice move for those trying to transition off Qt5 on your systems and prefer the "xconfig" route for managing your Linux kernel configuration. For those curious the screenshots in this article are using this new Kbuild Git code while running the xconfig interface built for Qt 6.4 on Ubuntu Linux.

The Kconfig updates for Linux 6.6 also enable the -Wenum-conversion compiler warning where supported, refactors the rpm-pkg target for building kernel RPMs, enables additional compiler warnings for "W=1" kernel builds, the Debian source package now supports "DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=N" for controlling the number of parallel build jobs, and various other refinements.

See the Kbuild pull request for the full list of related changes for Linux 6.6.