agnos.is

Published: 2025-04-16T12:58:45+02:00

The Gentoo libre-kernel dist-kernel is now working again.

A few months ago, I updated my personal overlay with the latest stable version of the gentoo-kernel package (6.12.16 at the time). But the build would always fail with a warning-as-error regarding extra arguments to sprintf in one of the drm modules.

But finally, I have fixed this. There is a kernel setting called CONFIGDRMWERROR. Normally, this is set to 'n' (i.e. no, disabled). But somehow, this option has been defaulted to 'y' (i.e., enabled). I'm not sure where or how this was changed, but I assume it's something in the Gentoo kernel configs. It took me a long, long time to find this:

• I don't have a huge amount of time for delving into build issues.
• The kernel would compile for 40 minutes before failing.
• It's not immediately obvious why the warning causes failure.

I finally sat down and started poking around, and in my grepping of the kernel sources, I found the CONFIGDRMWERROR setting. After checking the documentation, and found that it was supposed to be set to off by default, I updated the ebuild, and now it builds!

There is one problem: the verify-sig USE flag seems to be broken, despite the presence of the key and signing file. But that's for a later time...

License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Written by: @[email protected]