[Buildroot] linux: why is vmlinux only available for mips?

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi,

linux/Config.in contains the following configuration option:

config BR2_LINUX_KERNEL_VMLINUX
        bool "vmlinux"
        depends on BR2_mips || BR2_mipsel

The depend statement causes the vmlinux target only to be available
for mips processors.
For powerpc for example, only uImage and zImage are selectable.

However, I'd like to have vmlinux in the output/images directory.
First of all because I am directly loading this on target, rather than
uImage or zImage.
Secondly, right now my wrapper scripts go and fetch the vmlinux
executable in output/build/linux-<version>/vmlinux, which has the
disadvantage of needing to know what version of Linux was configured
in buildroot. I'd like to have a way to get the vmlinux file from
whichever version was configured in buildroot. Making sure it ends up
in output/images seems the simplest way.

I patched the Config.in file to read:

config BR2_LINUX_KERNEL_VMLINUX
        bool "vmlinux"
        depends on BR2_mips || BR2_mipsel || BR2_powerpc

which works fine.
I would even assume that every target can benefit from this option.

Moreover, why don't we allow multiple targets? For example, in some
projects you have different ways of loading your target, e.g. u-boot
(uImage) and directly copying to memory with a probe (in which case
vmlinux would be better suited).

Thomas