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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: Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info> Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/1a788a8e7ba8a2063df08668f565efa832016032.1678021408.git.linux@leemhuis.infoSigned-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
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