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From:   Ulf Magnusson <ulfalizer@gmail.com>
Date:   Sun, 11 Feb 2018 21:42:09 +0100
Message-ID: <CAFkk2KRm+_NQ2QLUta7fbezngLpD3eZ5NEp57SymBRMUZQZ4wQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 4/7] kconfig: support new special property shell=
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>,
        Linux Kbuild mailing list <linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>,
        "Luis R . Rodriguez" <mcgrof@suse.com>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
        Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>,
        Michal Marek <michal.lkml@markovi.net>,
        Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>,
        Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>,
        linux-s390 <linux-s390@vger.kernel.org>,
        Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        "Van De Ven, Arjan" <arjan.van.de.ven@intel.com>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
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On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Ulf Magnusson <ulfalizer@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 6:56 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
>> Another case I mentioned before that I just want to make sure we don't
>> reintroduce the problem of getting "stuck" with a bad .config file.
>> While adding _STRONG support, I discovered the two-phase Kconfig
>> resolution that happens during the build. If you selected _STRONG with
>> a strong-capable compiler, everything was fine. If you then tried to
>> build with an older compiler, you'd get stuck since _STRONG wasn't
>> support (as detected during the first Kconfig phase) so the
>> generated/autoconf.h would never get updated with the newly selected
>> _REGULAR). I moved the Makefile analysis of available stack-protector
>> options into the second phase (i.e. after all the Kconfig runs), and
>> that worked to both unstick such configs and provide a clear message
>> early in the build about what wasn't available.
>>
>> If all this detection is getting moved up into Kconfig, I'm worried
>> we'll end up in this state again. If the answer is "you have to delete
>> autoconf.h if you change compilers", then that's fine, but it sure
>> seems unfriendly. :)
>
> Did you mean include/config/auto.conf? That's the one that gets
> included by the Makefiles.
>
> If the feature detection is moved into Kconfig, you should only need
> to rerun the configuration (make menuconfig/oldconfig/olddefconfig) if
> you change the compiler. That will update .config while taking the new
> features into account, and then the second phase during 'make' will
> update include/config/auto.conf from .config.
>
> That second Kconfig phase generates include/generated/autoconf.h and
> include/config/. The include/config/ directory implements dependencies
> between source files and Kconfig symbols by turning the symbols into
> (empty) files. When building (during the "second phase"), Kconfig
> compares .config with include/config/auto.conf to see what changed,
> and signals the changes to 'make' by touch'ing the files corresponding
> to the changed symbols. The idea is to avoid having to do a full
> rebuild whenever the configuration is changed.
>
> Check out scripts/basic/fixdep.c as well if you want to understand how it works.
>
> Cheers,
> Ulf

By the way:

That second phase is also a "normal" Kconfig run in the sense that it
does all the usual dependency checking stuff. Even if .config doesn't
respect dependencies, include/config/auto.conf will. So I think you
might not even need to rerun the configuration (though .config will be
out-of-date until you do).

Cheers,
Ulf