# Buildkernel question(s) ^^)



## voxel (Jul 30, 2013)

Hi everybody ^^)

I'm playing with a FreeBSD 8.4 installation and made some test builds of a custom kernel/world.

BTW, there are some things in that process that made me read (a lot) and hunt for a solution without finding it, so these questions:

In the 8.4 kernel configuration file (GENERIC amd64 in my case) that I have copied/renamed as MYKERNEL for playing with, there are two options that permit to include configuration files at compile time, the 
	
	



```
env GENERIC.hints
```
 and 
	
	



```
env GENERIC.env
```
 lines, cool!

BUT that doesn't work, when `make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL` has finished without errors and after a successful `make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL` and a reboot, if I look at the environment with `kenv` I don't see the environment variables I'd set in the MYKERNEL.env nor the changes made to the MYKERNEL.hints files.

It seems that make has completely ignored my two custom env and hints configuration files and used the default one instead. Why?

Questions : 

- where should the two custom .env and .hints configuration files be placed to make sure they will be used instead of the default ones?
- have I made some mistake in my custom files (that do compile, BTW)?

Thanks for the help ^^)


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## SirDice (Jul 31, 2013)

I've never needed to use either but if I recall correctly the .hints file is used at run-time, not during the build. See device.hints(5).


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