| 1 |
I'm planning to migrate several computers to Gentoo. At the moment I'm |
| 2 |
running two machines with ad-hoc kernel configurations based on the |
| 3 |
kernel configuration from the installation CD (which was created for |
| 4 |
2.6.26). In order to keep the maintenance effort for the new machines |
| 5 |
low, I would like to have a unified/baseline kernel configuration with |
| 6 |
minor adjustments for some machines. |
| 7 |
|
| 8 |
I have been thinking about this for several weeks now and came to the |
| 9 |
conclusion, that there are two sub-problems: Creating a universal kernel |
| 10 |
configuration and merging and maintaining specific configurations with |
| 11 |
the baseline configuration. |
| 12 |
|
| 13 |
The second problem can be solved by simple concatenation and/or |
| 14 |
defconfigman, kccmp and make silentoldconfig. OpenWRT does this pretty |
| 15 |
much the same way. |
| 16 |
|
| 17 |
Creating the baseline configuration is much harder. So far I tried make |
| 18 |
defconfig, the installation CD configuration and kernel-seeds.org. None |
| 19 |
really satisfied my requirements and often resulted in ad-hoc changes |
| 20 |
when I simply went through a compile and reboot cycle until everything |
| 21 |
worked. I had a look at policies of other GNU/Linux distributions [1,2] |
| 22 |
and found that I need to develop or adopt a policy for my systems (the |
| 23 |
Ubuntu "modular where possible" policy seems reasonable to me and |
| 24 |
probably makes the curent ad-hoc configuration unnecessary). I also |
| 25 |
thought about reusing kernel configurations from other distributions, |
| 26 |
but have some doubts about kernel version mismatches (i.e. the kernel |
| 27 |
versions of Gentoo and the other distribution differ) and about |
| 28 |
unintended implications of kernel options that I don't fully understand. |
| 29 |
|
| 30 |
The mailing list archives show that this topic has been partly discussed |
| 31 |
before (especially whether Gentoo should have a default kernel |
| 32 |
configuration like other distributions), so I don't want to start a |
| 33 |
lengthy discussion about this here. I'm more interested in what other |
| 34 |
people do for larger deployments/installations on heterogeneous hardware. |
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
Regards, |
| 37 |
Matthias-Christian |
| 38 |
|
| 39 |
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/KernelConfig |
| 40 |
[2] https://wiki.linaro.org/KernelConfigPolicyDraft |
Archives