All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3.
The Linux kernel’s make gconfig functionality for having a simple GTK user-interface for generating your Linux kernel configuration prior to compilation was recently ported to GTK3. That’s now good to go and in Linux 6.17 as an alternative to the TUI-based menuconfig or xconfig with its Qt6 interface.
Another Kbuild change for Linux 6.17 is adding the “TAR” variable to allow overriding the default tar command. The Linux kernel recently introduced various GNU-specific options to its Tar usage and that was causing problems for systems where GNU Tar isn’t the default in the PATH. Recent Gentoo Linux installations were one of the cases hitting issues over the Tar differences. Now the TAR= environment variable can be used for specifying an alternative location for the Tar to use.
Linux 6.17 Kbuild is also now sorting the symbol dump generated by gendwarfsyms, supports Zboot extraction in scripts/extract-vmlinux, and other changes.
Kbuild maintainership is also now being passed from Masahiro Yamada to new co-maintainers Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier.
More details on these Kbuild changes in Linux 6.17 via this pull that has since been merged to master.
