menuconfig

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Menuconfig" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help clarify the article. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (August 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. Please help rewrite the content so that it is more encyclopedic or move it to Wikiversity, Wikibooks, or Wikivoyage. (March 2012) This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

menuconfig for Linux version 4.4.2
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux
Type	Build automation tool
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.kernel.org

make menuconfig is one of five similar tools that can configure Linux source, a necessary early step needed to compile the source code. make menuconfig, with a menu-driven user interface, allows the user to choose the features of Linux (and other options) that will be compiled. It is normally invoked using the command make menuconfig; menuconfig is a target in Linux Makefile.

make menuconfig was not in the first version of Linux. The predecessor tool is a question-and-answer-based utility (make config, make oldconfig).

Variations of the tool for Linux configuration include:

• make xconfig, which requires Qt
• make gconfig, which uses GTK+
• make nconfig, which is similar to make menuconfig.

All these tools use the Kconfig language internally. Kconfig is also used in other projects, such as Das U-Boot, a bootloader for embedded devices, Buildroot, a tool for generating embedded Linux systems, and BusyBox, a single-executable shell utility toolbox for embedded systems.

Despite being a simple design, make menuconfig offers considerable advantages to the question-and-answer-based configuration tool make oldconfig, the most notable being a basic search system and the ability to load and save files with filenames different from ".config". make menuconfig gives the user an ability to navigate forwards or backwards directly between features, rather than using make config by pressing the ↵ Enter key to navigate linearly to the configuration for a specific feature.

If the user is satisfied with a previous .config file, using make oldconfig uses this previous file to answer all questions that it can, only interactively presenting the new features. This is intended for a version upgrade, but may be appropriate at other times.

make menuconfig is a light load on system resources unlike make xconfig (uses Qt as of version 2.6.31.1, formerly Tk) or make gconfig, which utilizes GTK+. It's possible to ignore most of the features with make config, and doing so makes it more likely that one will configure an incomplete or oversized kernel. It's recommended to start with the .config file included with Linux distribution, which makes it easier to configure a custom kernel.

Better than editing the .config by hand, make menuconfig shows the descriptions of each feature (by pressing the "Help" button while on a menu option), and adds some (primitive in version 2.6.31.1) dependency checking. With make oldconfig, dependency checking can be done in one step, but requires the user to locate the features that were changed, by hand, to be sure that the needed ones are still enabled.

Practically, using both make menuconfig and make oldconfig, diff, (also cvs and a decent text editor) provides the most flexibility and most dependability. Configuring Linux is a significant labor, so users are strongly advised to make backups of it (i.e. cp /usr/src/linux*/.config ~/savemywork.config).

The help information is distributed throughout the kernel source tree in the various files called Kconfig.

To use make menuconfig, Linux source is a requirement, a make tool, a C compiler, and the ncurses library.

To the left of the features is the setting (y, M, or empty) enclosed in two punctuation marks.

Note that the supplied dependency information is primitive, it does not tell you the names of the dependant features.

The user is encouraged to read the Linux README, since there are also many other make targets (beyond modules_install and install). Each will configure the kernel, but with different features activated, or using a different interactive interface; such as tinyconfig or allyesconfig.

1. make menuconfig
2. Next build the compressed kernel and its modules, a long process. make.
3. Install using your favorite method such as make modules_install, make install.

• GNU Compiler Collection
• TUI

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Linux kernel

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Menuconfig.

• The Linux Kernel Archives