Hi Jan,
> On 4 Feb 2026, at 17:15, Jan Beulich <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 04.02.2026 16:45, Bertrand Marquis wrote:
>>> On 4 Feb 2026, at 16:31, Jan Beulich <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On 04.02.2026 14:16, Bertrand Marquis wrote:
>>>> Xen does not currently document how to build the hypervisor on macOS, and
>>>> there is no Darwin configuration for a Homebrew-based toolchain. In
>>>> addition, the Makefile silent-mode detection can be tripped by -I paths
>>>> that contain an "s", which hides build commands unexpectedly.
>>>
>>> This wants submitting as a standalone fix, so it can be backported. But see
>>> also below. I don't, however, understand how -I could be useful here - our
>>> build system is self-contained, so any include directives used should be
>>> satisfiable without any -I.
>>
>> This is added automatically inside our Makefile if you build out of tree:
>>
>> MAKEFLAGS += --include-dir=$(abs_srctree)
>>
>> which ends up being -Ixxx when tested.
>
> Hmm, but I do have an 's' in my source path, yet I need to explicitly pass
> -s for the build to be silent.
I did further investigations and my previous assumptions where actually
wrong because i looked tat MAKEFLAGS value once the whole Makefile
was parsed and the include-dir flag is added after so it was not the reason
of the issue.
In fact the issue is coming from variables set on the command line (and
in my case O= with a path containing a s).
So you can easily reproduce the issue by just passing XX=s to the make
command line to do a test.
As a consequence, your proposed solution filtering -% is not working and
the only reliable solution is to actually use firstword to actually get the
short options list. This is making an assumption on MAKEFLAGS having
them first but my tests are showing that it is always the case.
I would propose to put a comment to explain the assumptions on which
the filtering is based on top:
Something like this:
diff --git a/xen/Makefile b/xen/Makefile
index 13e336ba5484..a7924fcb7af5 100644
--- a/xen/Makefile
+++ b/xen/Makefile
@@ -113,10 +113,10 @@ else
Q := @
endif
-# If the user is running make -s (silent mode), suppress echoing of
-# commands
-
-ifneq ($(findstring s,$(filter-out --%,$(MAKEFLAGS))),)
+# If the user is running make -s (silent mode), suppress echoing of commands.
+# This relies on GNU make encoding short options in the first MAKEFLAGS word;
+# if this changes in the future, this check may need revisiting.
+ifneq ($(findstring s,$(firstword $(MAKEFLAGS))),)
quiet := silent_
endif
Also i can put a fixes tag if you think that is useful:
Fixes: 4fdb4b71b152 ("xen/build: introduce if_changed and if_changed_rule")
Please tell me if that sounds ok for you and I will resubmit this as 2
different patches
instead of a single one.
Cheers
Bertrand
>
> Jan
