I don't remember when it happened, but sometime in the past four years, the Makefiles for the kernel named Linux changed. I can't remember exactly, but I do recall sometime “recently” that the kernel build output stopped looking like what I remember from 1991, and started looking like this:
CC arch/i386/kernel/semaphore.o
CC arch/i386/kernel/signal.o
This is a heck of a lot easier to read, but there was something cool
about having make display the whole gcc
command lines, like this:
gcc -m32 -Wp,-MD,arch/i386/kernel/.semaphore.o.d -nostdinc -isystem /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.0.3/include -D__KERNEL__ -Iinclude -include include/linux/autoconf.h -Wall -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -ffreestanding -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -msoft-float -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=i686 -mtune=pentium4 -Iinclude/asm-i386/mach-default -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign -D"KBUILD_STR(s)=#s" -D"KBUILD_BASENAME=KBUILD_STR(semaphore)" -D"KBUILD_MODNAME=KBUILD_STR(semaphore)" -c -o arch/i386/kernel/semaphore.o arch/i386/kernel/semaphore.c
gcc -m32 -Wp,-MD,arch/i386/kernel/.signal.o.d -nostdinc -isystem /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.0.3/include -D__KERNEL__ -Iinclude -include include/linux/autoconf.h -Wall -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -ffreestanding -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -msoft-float -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=i686 -mtune=pentium4 -Iinclude/asm-i386/mach-default -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign -D"KBUILD_STR(s)=#s" -D"KBUILD_BASENAME=KBUILD_STR(signal)" -D"KBUILD_MODNAME=KBUILD_STR(signal)" -c -o arch/i386/kernel/signal.o arch/i386/kernel/signal.c
I never gave it much thought, since the new form was easier to read. I
figured that those folks who still eat kernel code for breakfast knew
about this change well ahead of time. Of course, they were the only
ones who needed to see the verbose output of the gcc
command lines. I could live with seeing the simpler CC
lines for my purposes, until today.
I was compiling kernel code and for the first time since this change in
the Makefiles, I was using a non-default gcc to build
Linux. I wanted to double-check that I'd given the right options to
make throughout the process. I therefore found myself
looking for a way to see the full output again (and for the first
time). It was easy enough to figure out: giving the variable setting
V=1 to make gives you the verbose version.
For you Debian folks like me, we're using make-kpkg, so
the line we need looks like: MAKEFLAGS="V=1" make-kpkg
kernel_image.
It's nice sometimes to pretend I'm compiling 0.99pl12 again and not
2.6.20.7. :) No matter which options you give make, it is
still a whole lot easier to bootstrap Linux these days.