Very Computer

Greetings,

I have a kernel for a an embedded target developed in house.  I have a
"make dep" quesiton, not particular to any arch / board.  I performed
the following steps:

$ make dep          (Step 1)
$ make clean        (Step 2)
$ make zImage       (Step 3)

Everything is fine so far.  Then

$ "changed a #define in a header file"       (Step 4)
$ make zImage                                (Step 5)

Upon which I realized the changes in the header file were not picked
up.  So I did the following

$ make clean         (Step 6)
$ make zImage        (Step 7)

Now the changes were picked up.

Q. Do I need to do a "make dep" after I do any changes to any c or h
file (before Step 5)?

Q. If the above answer is NO, why did the build process not detect the
change in the header file.  Is the dependency file creation corrupted?
 Do I need to investigate the "dep" section of the Makefile.

Q. How do I go about debugging this issue.

Thanks in advance,
Ahmed.

The current kernel's Makefile is quite broken according to LKML.  Personally,
I mostly apply patches only, so I always `make mrproper' (which is a full
clean, so save config first) after patching the kernel.  I haven't modified
any of the headers, although I once played with sched.c, and of course the
Makefile does the right thing.

I think you have 3 choices:
1. Install the new kbuild 2.5 patch by Keith.  It should not affect actual
   code, but it might be a bit difficult to install.
2. Rebuild the whole tree after changing a header --- not viable, I think.
3. `touch' the affected files manually after changing headers.  If it is an
   arch-specific header or a driver, probably it is only used by files in
   the relevent directories, so you may touch them all.  If it is something
   like mm.h or fs.h, most of the kernel had to be rebuilt anyway, so just
   do a full rebuild.

Quote:> Q. If the above answer is NO, why did the build process not detect the
> change in the header file.  Is the dependency file creation corrupted?
>  Do I need to investigate the "dep" section of the Makefile.

> Q. How do I go about debugging this issue.

Since this seems to have been done in the new kbuild patch, it is not very
advisable to reinvent the wheel.  Just try the patch, or live with the current
conditions like most kernel developers.

Quote:

> Thanks in advance,
> Ahmed.