Since I started touching this subsystem, I found the name confusing
since this is the part where we actually compile the kernel and we have
a ready-to-use configuration.
The stated goal of the commit introducing it[1] is to provide a function
to
> make it possible to build a kernel with a user provided .config.
Considering that this is supposed to be a differentiation from other
build mechanisms and nowadays this is the only way to build kernels in
nixpkgs, I figured that `build.nix` is a better name.
`pkgs.linuxManualConfig` isn't renamed on purpose: Kloenk and I are
planning to do more involved work and it may become necessary to change
parts of the API. So asking users to do a migration now just to add
another one soon isn't worth it.
[1] bf7467cbb1
See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/437208#issuecomment-3288623669
Depends on https://github.com/NixOS/org/pull/172
As documented below, the idea is to essentially group all changes
rebuilding all VM tests with kernel updates and merge them together into
`master` whenever the Linux kernels get updated.
This documents the workflow of updates in the nixpkgs manual. While at
it, I removed the README from the packages because
* it's horribly outdated
* I didn't even know it exists which confirms that its discoverability
was very poor
and added the relevant portions into the nixpkgs manual as well.
PR #431115 changed extraStructuredConfig to structuredExtraConfig to
follow the deprecation warning about `extraConfig`. However,
`extraStructuredConfig` was mentioned in several places in the docs that
weren't addressed. Also, using this would silently fail since the code
in question would still accept the old key.
This patch updates the docs accordingly and throws an error if the
code-path is reached and `extraStructuredConfig` is being used.
linuxManualConfig involves more boilerplate to change the kernel. Use
the wrapper linuxPackages_custom which is wrapper that takes an
attribute sets and calls linuxManualConfig approrpriately.
This is much easier for beginners to use instead of linuxManualConfig
helper.
Point to linuxManualConfig for further customizations.
The Nixpkgs documentation on the linux kernel builders focused on
using and extending kernels that were already packaged, but never
mentioned that it's possible to also build a kernel almost "from
scratch".
The NixOS documentation went a bit deeper on manual linux kernel
configs, but that information wasn't particularly NixOS-specific.
This commit consolidates the information related to building the
kernel on Nixpkgs's documentation, while keeping any additional
NixOS-specific information on NixOS's documentation.
An additional README.md was created for contributor-facing
documentation.
