Currently, the single target build directly descends into the directory
of the target. For example,
$ make foo/bar/baz.o
... directly descends into foo/bar/.
On the other hand, the normal build usually descends one directory at
a time, i.e. descends into foo/, and then foo/bar/.
This difference causes some problems.
[1] miss subdir-asflags-y, subdir-ccflags-y in upper Makefiles
The options in subdir-{as,cc}flags-y take effect in the current
and its sub-directories. In other words, they are inherited
downward. In the example above, the single target will miss
subdir-{as,cc}flags-y if they are defined in foo/Makefile.
[2] could be built in a different directory
As Documentation/kbuild/modules.rst section 4.3 says, Kbuild can
handle files that are spread over several sub-directories.
The build rule of foo/bar/baz.o may not necessarily be specified in
foo/bar/Makefile. It might be specifies in foo/Makefile as follows:
[foo/Makefile]
obj-y := bar/baz.o
This often happens when a module is so big that its source files
are divided into sub-directories.
In this case, there is no Makefile in the foo/bar/ directory, yet
the single target descends into foo/bar/, then fails due to the
missing Makefile. You can still do 'make foo/bar/' for partial
building, but cannot do 'make foo/bar/baz.s'. I believe the single
target '%.s' is a useful feature for inspecting the compiler output.
Some modules work around this issue by putting an empty Makefile
in every sub-directory.
This commit fixes those problems by making the single target build
descend in the same way as the normal build does.
Another change is the single target build will observe the CONFIG
options. Previously, it allowed users to build the foo.o even when
the corresponding CONFIG_FOO is disabled:
obj-$(CONFIG_FOO) += foo.o
In the new behavior, the single target build will just fail and show
"No rule to make target ..." (or "Nothing to be done for ..." if the
stale object already exists, but cannot be updated).
The disadvantage of this commit is the build speed. Now that the
single target build visits every directory and parses lots of
Makefiles, it is slower than before. (But, I hope it will not be
too slow.)