On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:02 -0500, seth vidal wrote: > On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 14:37 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote: > > Just to provide some input to this debate - > > > > Mandriva allows external modules in the official repositories. DKMS is > > used to address the problems Jesse raised. This works pretty well, > > although only after quite a lot of experience and tweaking of the system > > - there were problems associated with it in the past. > > DKMS requires you have all the devel tools installed to get the kernel > modules built. This was discarded as an option for fedora for that > reason. Yeah. I don't want to get too far into an issue I'm not advocating for in the first place, but, briefly: MDV builds DKMS 'binary' packages - packages with pre-built modules, in a layout that DKMS understands - (it's done semi-automatically from the DKMS 'source' packages) for the most important modules (like NVIDIA and ATI) for the initial release kernel and all official update kernels, for stable releases. These get sent out at the same time as the official updates. So you can run the most common external modules on an official release without DKMS ever actually having to build the module. (This is where a lot of the problems I alluded to came from. It took a few years of experience to get this whole system to the point where it actually *works* smoothly). This isn't done for more obscure DKMS-handled modules, for backport and third-party kernels, or for Cooker (Rawhide equivalent). If you use any of those, you have to have the DKMS 'source' package installed, which brings in the basic compilation toolchain and the appropriate kernel headers via dependencies. > The weirdnesses with handling kernel module updates when you're not > updating the kernel (and/or both) is excruciating. If you want to do > some painful reading look back at the kmod/akmod/kernmod discussion from > a few years ago. I've probably read several alternative incarnations of much the same discussion. =) It is somewhat inherently a painful area, and MDV certainly has quite a lot of tweaking to DKMS and some significant internal architecture to make it all work more or less smoothly. Which is why I said it's probably not worth the effort. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
