In 2.6.23, if you unpacked a kernel source tarball and then ran
"make menuconfig" you'd be presented with this message: # using
defaults found in arch/i386/defconfig  and the default options
would be set.  The same thing in 2.6.24 does not give you any
"using defaults" message, and the default config options within
menuconfig are rather blank (e.g. no PCI support). You can work
around this by explicitly running "make defconfig" before
menuconfig, but it would be nice to have the behaviour the way
it was for 2.6.23 (and the way it still is for other archs).
I've looked into the problem. It works on 2.6.23 because of
init/Kconfig which is still unchanged:  default
"arch/$ARCH/defconfig"  arch/i386/defconfig and
arch/x86_64/defconfig existed in 2.6.23, but not in 2.6.24 due
to the arch merge.  I've identified why it worked in 2.6.23 but
I'm not really sure of the right way to fix it for the newer
kernels. I tried adding another default in DEFCONFIG_LIST:
default "arch/$SRCARCH/configs/$KBUILD_DEFCONFIG" but it