• Thorsten Leemhuis's avatar
    docs: describe how to quickly build a trimmed kernel · efe92046
    Thorsten Leemhuis authored
    Add a text explaining how to quickly build a kernel, as that's something
    users will often have to do when they want to report an issue or test
    proposed fixes. This is a huge and frightening task for quite a few
    users these days, as many rely on pre-compiled kernels and have never
    built their own. They find help on quite a few websites explaining the
    process in various ways, but those howtos often omit important details
    or make things too hard for the 'quickly build just for testing' case
    that 'localmodconfig' is really useful for. Hence give users something
    at hand to guide them, as that makes it easier for them to help with
    testing, debugging, and fixing the kernel.
    
    To keep the complexity at bay, the document explicitly focuses on how to
    compile the kernel on commodity distributions running on commodity
    hardware. People that deal with less common distributions or hardware
    will often know their way around already anyway.
    
    The text describes a few oddities of Arch and Debian that were found by
    the author and a few volunteers that tested the described procedure.
    There are likely more such quirks that need to be covered as well as a
    few things the author will have missed -- but one has to start
    somewhere.
    
    The document heavily uses anchors and links to them, which makes things
    slightly harder to read in the source form. But the intended target
    audience is way more likely to read rendered versions of this text on
    pages like docs.kernel.org anyway -- and there those anchors and links
    allow easy jumps to the reference section and back, which makes the
    document a lot easier to work with for the intended target audience.
    
    Aspects relevant for bisection were left out on purpose, as that is a
    related, but in the end different use case. The rough plan is to have a
    second document with a similar style to cover bisection. The idea is to
    reuse a few bits from this document and link quite often to entries in
    the reference section with the help of the anchors in this text.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarThorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/1a788a8e7ba8a2063df08668f565efa832016032.1678021408.git.linux@leemhuis.infoSigned-off-by: default avatarJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
    efe92046
quickly-build-trimmed-linux.rst 46.9 KB