Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel configuration management

Matthias-Christian Ott <ott@×××××.org> wrote:

> I'm planning to migrate several computers to Gentoo. At the moment I'm
> running two machines with ad-hoc kernel configurations based on the
> kernel configuration from the installation CD (which was created for
> 2.6.26). In order to keep the maintenance effort for the new machines
> low, I would like to have a unified/baseline kernel configuration with
> minor adjustments for some machines.
>
> I have been thinking about this for several weeks now and came to the
> conclusion, that there are two sub-problems: Creating a universal kernel
> configuration and merging and maintaining specific configurations with
> the baseline configuration.
>
> The second problem can be solved by simple concatenation and/or
> defconfigman, kccmp and make silentoldconfig. OpenWRT does this pretty
> much the same way.
>
> Creating the baseline configuration is much harder. So far I tried make
> defconfig, the installation CD configuration and kernel-seeds.org. None
> really satisfied my requirements and often resulted in ad-hoc changes
> when I simply went through a compile and reboot cycle until everything
> worked. I had a look at policies of other GNU/Linux distributions [1,2]
> and found that I need to develop or adopt a policy for my systems (the
> Ubuntu "modular where possible" policy seems reasonable to me and
> probably makes the curent ad-hoc configuration unnecessary). I also
> thought about reusing kernel configurations from other distributions,
> but have some doubts about kernel version mismatches (i.e. the kernel
> versions of Gentoo and the other distribution differ) and about
> unintended implications of kernel options that I don't fully understand.
>
> The mailing list archives show that this topic has been partly discussed
> before (especially whether Gentoo should have a default kernel
> configuration like other distributions), so I don't want to start a
> lengthy discussion about this here. I'm more interested in what other
> people do for larger deployments/installations on heterogeneous hardware.

Well, I have most things in modules and a lot of them, I don't have the
hardware for, but it was very handy when I was able to take my configs
over to a vm from regular hardware and it booted up right away.  I am
also using an initrd.

HOpe that helps.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@××××××××××.com