[ Mail from this list is not reaching me for some reason - hence the lack of thread headers. ] On Thu, 03 Aug 2006 04:22:38 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 02:54 +0100, Jon Masters wrote:
> weak-modules is part of some driver updates work we're doing at Red > Hat and also involves folks working on Fedora Extras "kmod" kernel > packaging (see the packaging list archives). Essentially, this and > other scripts are part of a system for allowing compatible kernel > modules to continue to work after a kernel update occurs - > weak-modules is the part that figures out which kernels are compatible > with a driver.
so someone is finally working on a real kernel abi check rather than just the quite bad "check modversions" check which was useless (both too many false positives and negatives)?
There's more to do here. Next, I'm going to be modifying various other tools so that they relate source and binary versions of functions (and other symbols too) precisely so that it's possible to track ABI changes with ease - the weak-updates stuff is just part of it. I'll be saying more about this in due course, once there's stuff to actually talk about! :-) Since both we (Red Hat) and others (Novell/SuSE) have made changes to module-init-tools, I'm also going to put my upstream m-i-t hat on and get depmod to use an optional config file so we can properly handle priorities of directories under /lib/modules. Right now, on Fedora, the priorities are as follows (the OpenSuSE directory structure/priorities are different): /lib/modules/*/updates - override everything. For sysadmins to use for manual control. /lib/modules/*/extra - override everything in the kernel and in weak-updates. /lib/modules/* - built in kernel modules. /lib/modules/weak-updates - compatible drivers that have been installed. The idea is that these will head upstream so in later kernels, if there's a built-in, we use that instead. There are other things that need to be genericized and sent upstream. weak-modules will probably become a c-based utility and /might/ become part of m-i-t if the other distros are interested in this being more generically available. I should point out that the folks at SuSE have been extremely helpful and communicative in this process - they already had a similar technology in OpenSuSE so we were able to learn a few things from that in the process. What this stuff does for you (I prefered the other poster's use of language...) is help in the case that a security errata or other minor kernel update forces itself upon you. Not everyone (read: most people) view recompiling modules every ten minutes as a good idea, so if a new kernel is kABI compatible with existing modules, those are automatically made available. I know Fedora doesn't have a stable kABI, but I'm hopeful that this will be useful to those folks who do rely upon (GPLed) out-of-tree drivers. Jon. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
