kmods poll

[Jarod Wilson]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 09:21 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 08:04 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>
>>> I'm mostly just rambling.  In the past, there has been some vocal
>>> dissent for having kmods period, so I wanted to know the opinions from
>>> people on a more targeted list than fedora-devel.
>> Officially, there may only be two, but obviously third parties will
>> supply others - so we need the infrastructure.
>>
>> In fact, I'm working on a project to allow automatic, online driver
>> updates via kmods - I'll have more to say in due course on that.
> 
> Is that why there are the "updates" and "weak-updates" directories
> in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ today?
> 
> I've been wondering about those.  And what would they be used for?  E.g.
> updating e1000 when there's a bugfix that doesn't really require the
> whole kernel to be spun again?

Yes, an updated e1000 driver could land in updates (though kmod tends to
use 'extra' instead of 'updates', but other repos kernel module packages
use updates). The weak-updates is only used by RHEL at the moment, as
far as I recall. Basically, you install kmod-foo for kernel
2.6.18-8.el5, and when you install kernel 2.6.18-8.0.3.el5, a symlink
back into the -8.el5 module tree for that kmod-foo gets created in
-8.0.3.el5's weak-updates folder. A kernel-provided driver will take
precedence, but if none is provided, the one in weak-updates will get
used instead. Because of the stable kabi, drivers from an earlier kernel
*should* work just fine with a newer one. Or something more or less like
that...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com


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