TIL - Buildroot and LIBFOO_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUPS

Posted by Marcus Folkesson on Tuesday, September 12, 2023

TIL - Buildroot and LIBFOO_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUPS

TIL, Today I Learned, is more of a "I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too" rather than a full blog post

Some applications in a Linux system depends on certain kernel features to work properly. I'm currently working on adding support for CRIU [1] in Buildroot [2] which has such requirements.

That's when I stumble upon the LIBFOO_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUP variable.

LIBFOO_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUPS

As the documentation [3] says:

* +LIBFOO_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUPS+ lists the Linux kernel configuration
  options that are needed to build and use this package, and without
  which the package is fundamentally broken. This shall be a set of
  calls to one of the kconfig tweaking option: `KCONFIG_ENABLE_OPT`,
  `KCONFIG_DISABLE_OPT`, or `KCONFIG_SET_OPT`.
  This is seldom used, as package usually have no strict requirements on
  the kernel options.

This is a variable to tweak the kernel configuration from the package itself. In my case I had to:

define CRIU_LINUX_CONFIG_FIXUPS
         $(call KCONFIG_ENABLE_OPT,CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE)
endef

To enable CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE upon package selection.