Commit Graph

1 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Masahiro Yamada
316d55d55f Documentation: kconfig: document a new Kconfig macro language
Add a document for the macro language introduced to Kconfig.

The motivation of this work is to move the compiler option tests to
Kconfig from Makefile.  A number of kernel features require the
compiler support.  Enabling such features blindly in Kconfig ends up
with a lot of nasty build-time testing in Makefiles.  If a chosen
feature turns out unsupported by the compiler, what the build system
can do is either to disable it (silently!) or to forcibly break the
build, despite Kconfig has let the user to enable it.  By moving the
compiler capability tests to Kconfig, features unsupported by the
compiler will be hidden automatically.

This change was strongly prompted by Linus Torvalds.  You can find
his suggestions [1] [2] in ML.  The original idea was to add a new
attribute with 'option shell=...', but I found more generalized text
expansion would make Kconfig more powerful and lovely.  The basic
ideas are from Make, but there are some differences.

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/12/9/577
[2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/7/527

Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
2018-05-29 03:31:19 +09:00