Consider adding RPi-specific Kconfig patch which pre-selects hardware-essential options

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
linux

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked Gentoo Kconfig patch and the kernel configuration flow around make defconfig. Identify the Raspberry Pi-specific Kconfig entry points and the required SDHC, VideoCore, and device-tree options. Done means an optional configuration mechanism reliably selects essential hardware settings and can represent known-bad options.

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Description

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Moving from an original RPi to an RPi2 has caused several issues when building custom kernels (especially in relation to the MMC/SDHC controller), partly because it's not immediately obvious what kernel options are mandatory for the RPi to boot with full functionality (e.g. SDHC, access to VideoCore, appropriate DT options set, etc.).

It would be a huge benefit to integrate a patch such as:

https://github.com/gtgt/gt-overlay/blob/master/patches/sys-kernel/pf-sources/3.11.1-4567_distro-Gentoo-Kconfig.patch

... which Gentoo uses to provide an optional but highly intuitive method of ensuring that the kernel has minimal functionality to try to guarantee that it will at least boot. The use-case would be when other areas of the kernel config have been extensively customised (thus making running 'make defconfig' and importing the changes a long job) but where the hardware-specific choices need to be re-applied.

This would also provide a mechanism to black-list any known-bad options which, for a given release, are known to cause issues.

Thanks in advance,

Stuart

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