Enable more kernel features in Linaro kernels?

[Michael Opdenacker]

Hi,

The lack of available kernel modules (compared to what you have in a standard Ubuntu distro) makes it more difficult to use our images for prototypes. Lots of questions on Ask Linaro correspond to missing kernel modules and features, and it's annoying to have to rebuild a kernel to add missing features. This probably even discourages many beginners and make them lose interest in testing our releases.

The same happened to me last week-end when I had to replace my dead IGEPv2 board by a more recent one, and choose to use the Linaro distro. I had to recompile my kernel because the Linaro omap kernel missed the below settings:

CONFIG_DM, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM, CONFIG_DM_CRYPT, CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA256

(I needed that to access an encrypted disk).

It would make everyone's life easier if Linaro could ship bigger hardware packs with more modules compiled by default, typically with kernel configurations similar or identical to the ones used by Ubuntu. Yes, it would make the root filesystems bigger, but wouldn't it be acceptable for prototypes? I guess that's what most Linaro hardware packs are used: building prototypes and testing software releases.

Thoughts?

Michael.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

We're planning to finally fix this during 12.05, once we create the proper config fragment to be used by our Ubuntu kernel packages.

With the fragment in place, this will be naturally used by all the flavors we have, which will help our users :-)

[Michael Opdenacker (michael-opdenacker)]

Hi Ricardo,

That will be awesome. Thanks a lot!

:-)

Michael.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

Config fragments created during this cycle, but not yet fully applied on all our kernel flavours. Moving to 12.06.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

The Ubuntu config fragments we're using for the 12.06 based kernels:
- 3.4: http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=kernel/configs.git;a=blob;f=linaro/configs/ubuntu.conf;hb=refs/heads/config-core-3.4
- 3.5: http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=kernel/configs.git;a=blob;f=linaro/configs/ubuntu.conf;hb=refs/heads/config-core-tracking

This should finally enable additional functionalities for all flavors we're producing.