[elrepo-devel] kmod packaging cleanup for rhel-6

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Farkas Levente wrote:

Not going into detail of your complete post.

I'd like to point out that the case for Fedora is not the same case for 
RHEL. With Fedora every kernel may have incompatibilities and therefore 
it's essential that every kmod is rebuilt for every kernel and should be 
able to coexist.

This means yum/apt need to allow to have several versions of the same kmod 
installed, and it should understand when to update kmod's when a new 
kernel is installed.

For RHEL we can provide a single kmod that works for multiple kernels (in 
the best case, all kernels). And therefor it makes it very simple. Only 
one RPM needs to be installed, and if a newer is available it can be 
updated, just like normal packages.

This last case is not completely true, there are cases where a newer kmod 
can be incompatible with one or more older kernels. But having a single 
kmod package is a big advantage.

Now, what I always prefered to have is a kmod-build infrastructure that is 
smart enough to test a kmod for compatibility with all (installed) kernels 
and packages multiple versions of a kernel module (.ko) into a single RPM 
package. For RHEL that could mean that it ships 3 .ko files, and 
weak-modules would automatically symlink the correct .ko file for the 
correct kernel.

For Fedora, this could work as well, if it is made clear how many 
(older) kernels the project is willing to support _and_ if such a kmod RPM 
package doesn't become too big (think about ELRepo's alsa or video4linux 
kmod RPM).

But the advantage would be that a stable kABI is not that important 
because a single kmod RPM package would simply support current and older 
kernels by default. For newer kernels of course it may be necessary to 
provide an updated kmod RPM in the worst case. Which is acceptable and not 
different from now, the benefit would be that the old kernel would still 
be supported as well.

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