On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 07:53:38PM -0800, JD wrote:
Thank you for the elucidation, Don. I find it very useful,
as I have struggled with this issue for a long time.
So, for a sysadmin, who needs a custom configured kernel
for multiple machines, and wants to produce the custom
binaries for these machines that have same architecture and
devices, to enable features and drivers that are not by
default enabled in the vanilla fedora binary rpm: what is the
sysadmin to do?
It seems to me that the rpm packagers need to provide a way
for the admin to use an existing config file which has enabled
all that is needed, as a base config file. Thus running rpmbuild
should somehow use this base config file, and add to it if necessary,
but at least keep the features/drivers that are enabled in the
base config file, enabled for the actual build.
To date, I have not succeeded in producing a kernel with my drivers
enabled as per an existing config file, using the rpmbuild method.
PS: my needed drivers are in staging, and they work. But I do not
seem to be able to use my current .config file
(/boot/config-2.6....et...etc)
as a base config file (such as ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/config-x86-generic
(my arch is i686), when building from a new source rpm release.
It never yielded a kernel with my drivers enabled.
Try config-i686-PAE and see if that works instead. That file overrides
config-x86-generic (according to Makefile.config) and fedora uses i686-PAE
by default.
Cheers,
Don