[RULE] Important: Fedora may offer kernel settings for RULE

[James Miller (office)]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, M. Fioretti wrote:

> Hello,
>
> As already mentioned in the past, sometimes I subscribe to some
> mailing list just to ask support for RULE, or some partnership.  After
> the LKML, last week I joined the Fedora developers list (for the full
> story, check the thread "Better packaging for older hardware" in the
> archives at this URL:
> http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>
> Summing it up, nobody less than Alan Cox said he's used RULE on some
> older PCs and that:
>
> > On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 05:51:05 at 05:51:05AM -0400, Alan Cox  alan at redhat.com  wrote:
> > > 386/486 kernel RPMs make sense but you probably also want to think
> > > about that as a seperate kernel with less options selected and
> > > without the more high end tuning Red Hat has.
> >
> I answered:
>
> > Absolutely. [snip] We... just need a very good initial push in the
> > right direction. Right .config, proper /proc settings, whatever.
>
> The answer from Michael Johnson, one of the kernel RPMs maintainer,
> was:
>
> > It wouldn't be hard for us to provide an appropriately trimmed
> > config file in the kernel srpm, automatically maintained to follow
> > generic changes to the config files but with specific slimming
> > changing, even if we didn't build that kernel by default.  It might
> > break without our noticing in that case, but then that could always
> > be fixed...
>
> > However, the only "slimming" bits we have expertise of any sort in
> > is summed up in the BOOT kernel config file, so we'd need a pretty
> > good idea of what kinds of changes we were going to make that would
> > really satisfy most everyone...  That's the real hard part.
>
> In other words, we have now the possibility to have help for RULE
> users, although unofficially, from straight inside the Red Hat/Fedora
> development. If we can provide a list of config options, *they* will
> add it to the source RPM as an alternative build option, and keep it
> updated and coherent with future patches.
>
> If that happens, it would be possible to rebuild i386 kernels or low
> ram kernels for newer CPUs with the lowest patching effort and the
> highest degree of confidence that it works nicely with all the other
> RH rpms.
>
> What now? I honestly confess that I don't know what to suggest: please
> post it any config setting that may be useful, and I'll forward the
> final result to the developers.
>
> It would be great if the folks also subscribed to the Linux kernel
> mailing list could ask there for contributions. The starting point are
> the MakeFile and spec file of the latest Red Hat kernel source
> RPMs. If somebody wants them but has no access, let us know here.
>
This all sounds very promising, Marco.  It's a bit over my head, though
(I'm even more clueless than you when it comes to kernel
config/compiling).  But here's one possibility: the developer of
Basiclinux provides a custom kernel, carefully compiled for 486
compatibility (and small size).  That's one of the few "customized"
features of BL - the rest come straight from Slack 7.1.  This is a 2.2.16
kernel, btw.  He does provide a config file for that kernel at his
website.  Would that help out here?  Let me know, and I'll provide the URL
if needed.

James


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