[oe] [Angstrom-devel] [RFC] Get rid of adhoc machine-specific messing with kernel packages

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2006-12-28 at 18:50 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Paul Sokolovsky schreef:
> > Hello angstrom-distro-devel,
> > 
> >   Thanks for providing pre-holiday 20061219 snapshots for testing.
> > They don't provide separate zImages, but well, that's ok - they are in
> > the images, after all.
> > 
> >   Well, not for hx4700, for example. Because:
> > 
> > ======== linux-handhelds-2.6.inc =====
> > FILES_kernel-image_hx4700 = ""
> > ALLOW_EMPTY_hx4700 = "1"
> > FILES_kernel-image_htcuniversal = ""
> > ALLOW_EMPTY_htcuniversal = "1"
> > ======================================
> > 
> >   Oops. Sources of such a special treatment of hx4700 and htcuniversal
> > would be unclear to outsider, but people who deal with (mis)features
> > of "ipaqs" know, that hx4700 has one (sic!, even if the most popular)
> > bootloader which doesn't use zImage in the image, but instead requires
> > adhoc means to install kernel, ditto for Universal, though bootloader
> > is another.
> > 
> >   So, what is tried here is to "save space". But there're few issues:
> 
> Those lines should go, but not before we have a way to exclude 'kernel-image' from the
> rootfs *and* kernel-module-foo doesn't depend kernel-image anymore.

The accepted approach is to make the kernel-image file empty which
solves both those problems. This is the same as the Zaurus which also
requires an external zImage file (and this code is handled in
linux-rp.inc in the same way as the above but for all machines).

Arguably, the machine files should perhaps set this...

The only other solution probably involves a nasty anonymous function
acting on a setting of EXTERNAL_KERNEL_IMAGE = "1" in kernel.bbclass.

Richard