Kernel Developers Discuss Improving Kernel Configurations

Jean Delvare, a name commonly associated with the LM_Sensors project while being an employee at SUSE, has raised an important discussion item on the kernel mailing list about improving the kernel configuration (Kconfig) options when building the Linux kernel.

The latest Linux kernel Kconfig files are up to 6000+ lines and tuning the drivers to compile and other features of the kernel is becoming an increasingly painful task as more features and drivers get added to the kernel. Jean raised the point that there's an increasing number of additions to the kernel configuration that are drivers mostly associated with ARM hardware, while he and so many other Linux users are building for Intel x86 platforms. However, the drivers are technically platform agnostic and are still shown for x86 users building their own kernel even though the major users are in the ARM space.

Delvare is trying to push for proper hardware dependencies within Linux kernel configuration options. Still there would be a test flag for those wishing to build a "full" Linux kernel with effectively every mainline driver under the sun in order to test kernel builds, etc.

Jean so far has received mixed responses about his proposal, which can be viewed in full via the Indiana LKML archives.