• Kai Germaschewski's avatar
    kbuild: Split Makefile into needs / needs not .config · 77c83c75
    Kai Germaschewski authored
    The current top-level Makefile has a fundamental problem which
    makes "make oldconfig vmlinux" impossible:
    
    It includes .config, which is changed by "oldconfig". So after "oldconfig"
    .config has changed and the .config the Makefile had read is obsolete.
    make provides a mechanism to cope with this, it'll restart automatically 
    if any of the files it included changed, if you let it know that you
    changed it, just using a normal rule which has .config as its target.
    
    However, once you tell make that "make oldconfig" changes .config, you
    have another problem: oldconfig always uses .config to be remade, there's
    no mechanism to tell if it's up to date. So makes notices that .config
    has changed, restarts, makes oldconfig again, notices that .config has
    changed, restarts, ... you get the picture.
    
    The way to solve this is to do a proper two-stage approach: If you just
    say "make oldconfig", there's no need for the Makefile to even read the
    .config. If it does not, it won't restart and recurse infintely.
    So we divide the Makefile into two sections: One for targets which don't
    need the variables from .config, like *config, clean, mrproper and
    one section which does the actual build, which needs to know the
    CONFIG_ options.
    
    If one of the "noconfig" targets is given, we handle those, without
    reading .config. From there, we call make again, filtering out the already
    handled targets, to do the main work.
    
    The fact that this actually works correctly can be seen by trying
    "make vmlinux oldconfig" which will execute things in the right
    order - and this is not just nitpicking, it means that "-j" will
    get this case right, too.
    
    The $(CONFIGURATION) hack used to start "make config" automatically
    can go away now, too. Since we don't know which of make *config the
    user prefers, we'll just ask him call "make whatever-config" himself,
    instead of forcing "make config" on him.
    77c83c75
Makefile 1.3 KB