On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 12:12:58PM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote: > On Sunday 23 July 2006 11:57, Axel Thimm wrote: > > kABI will not really help, as it only measures what has changed in the > > ABI from on kernel release to the next, checking to see whether an old > > kernel module can be safely recycled. It will not magically force > > kernel developers to introduce a stable ABI, function signatures and > > other symbols will change just as frequent. > > > > And the areas where kABI would help is where the kernel has reached > > some level of maturity where indeed the ABI has become stable. But > > these are not the typical subsystems external kernel modules are built > > for. > > > > Currenlty the most frequent cases of kernel modules are such usually > > requiring v4l2, ieee82011 or vm subsystems. And these are currently > > guaranteed to change from kernel release to kernel release. And once > > these stabilize and other areas of the kernel become interesting > > you'll have the same situation there. Currently (the last 1-2 years) > > every kernel release breaks 70-80% of external kernel modules at build > > level already, and kABI would only confirm this. > > There are kernel updates for new rebase, there are kernel updates for > security, there are kernel updates for specific bug fixes. There are a lot > of cases where the ABI would not change for particular drivers. SCSI, Video, > yes even wireless. Any naming scheme that will be discussed should take the > KABI system into account and use that. Even if the ABI changes just as > frequently as kernel version we should still use the ABI so that the same > naming and packaging scheme will work across Fedora Core current releases, > maint releases (Legacy), and RHEL (and rebuilds) releases. Well, add to the above that the kABI isn't going to give you an orderable single entry like uname-r does (but maybe noone cares, the kernel module packaging at least wouldn't), and that no user will understand the mapping between his kernel, whose uname -r he knows, and a kABI checksum. But in principle if one day kABI checksums gain a popularity/visibilty like uname-r has today on the user's side, then I agree, that uname-r in the name could be replaced with a kABI checksum. In the kmdl scheme this would be a rather trivial change. But you're not going to make friends with people already losing lunch on embedding uname-r in the name. :) -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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