Kernel module permutation problems

[Dan Williams]

Hi,

So DavidZ and I were talking about this, and the matrix of different
modules for just one SRPM here gets huge.  We have the following issues:

1) UP, SMP, hugemen, XEN
2) i586, i686, x86_64, em64t, ppc32, ppc64, ia64
3) How many past kernels to rebuild for

Even with just these 3, we get at _least_ 30 different kernel module
RPMs (3 "flavors", minimum of 5 arches, 2 past kernels).  That's a huge
number.

Questions:

Is this really what we want?

How do we deal with the explosion of permutations of kernel modules?

Resources in the buildsystem aren't infinite, how many jobs/rpmbuilds
should we actually kick off?

We can't possibly rebuild modules for every previously released kernel.
We've can only really do, IMHO, <= 4 builds of each module for a
different kernel.  How many should we actually do?

This is all independent of the actual specfile mechanisms and mechanics
of rebuilding the modules.  This is simply a question of how many
factors do we care about here.  It's not out of the question to start
small and grow the permutations out as we go along and add more
architectures, flavors, etc.

Dan