Hallo Reinhard, On Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:27:36 +0100, Reinhard Nissl wrote: > is there a chance to compile for example Asus atk0110 driver for > my distros default kernel? No, this is not possible. You could compile the atk0110 driver itself easily, however it requires a hook in the ACPI subsystem which is missing in standard kernels. So unfortunately you need to rebuild your kernel for this part. > I'd like to stay with openSUSE-11.1's kernel-default-2.6.27.19-3.2.1. > > I'm used to build modules outside of the kernel tree in the > v4l-dvb project. So I wonder why it shouldn't be possible to > achieve the same for the above driver. In general it is possible. We don't have an external tree but the hwmon API is so simple that it is very stable, which means that you can often pick the latest version of a driver in the upstream kernel tree, an build it for your kernel using a standalone Makefile. The only case where it doesn't work is when a given hwmon driver builds on other APIs which _did_ change. This is the case of acpi for the atk0110 driver, or of i2c for a number of other hwmon drivers. Sometimes it is possible to update the code to take API changes into account backwards, but when there was no equivalent API in the old kernel (which is the case for the atk0110 driver) this is simply not possible. -- Jean Delvare
