Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 65677
RFE: "binoffset" utility is missing
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.0 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020408 Description of problem: the 2.4.18-4 kernel source supports an option, "Kernel .config option," that allows the .config file used to build a kernel to be embedded in a kernel, which can then be extracted later. the extraction script is apparently the file /usr/src/linux/scripts/extract-ikconfig, which calls the program "binoffset". the binoffset program does not exist in this distribution anywhere, but is available on the net by perusing the LKML mailing lists. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run "extract-ikconfig" 2. 3. Actual Results: fails with "binoffset" not found Expected Results: binoffset should be part of the distribution so that this script works Additional info: http://lists.insecure.org/linux-kernel/2002/Mar/att-0331/02-binoffset.c
this problem still exists in rh 8.0, with the 2.4.20-2.2 kernel. will anything ever be done about it?
To be honest I see little point in the embedding of the .config (and I expect it to not be there forever in the source either).
well, it seems that it should be one or the other. either that feature should be fully supported, or the script and kernel config feature that supports that should be removed, no?
Ehmm.. that's why the option is off.... I hope you don't mean that Red Hat should patch out all config options that aren't suppored because that would mean a) a lot of work and b) that people who want to use things like devfs or reiserfs would get rather upset...
i'm confused. why should it matter whether the option is "off"? when i run "make xconfig", i can clearly select whether or not to embed config info in the new kernel. if this feature is supposed to work, it should be fixed. if, on the other hand, it's deprecated, then it should be removed. it's unacceptably misleading to display a kernel config option that suggests a certain feature exists when it clearly does not. and this has nothing to do with analogous support for reiserfs or devfs -- the shell script "extract-ikconfig" exists in the scripts/ directory in the kernel source tree, so this again suggests that that feature should be there. if one (apparently) builds config info into the kernel, and tries to get that info back later by running "extract-ikconfig", that script fails. that's a bug.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/