Building external kernel modules with kernel 2.6...

[Aaron Gaudio]

According to this (http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4389927951.html)
article, you must have the linux kernel source tree, with compiled
binaries (at least the vermagic.o file) in order to build an kernel
module outside of the kernel tree. 

For obvious reasons, this is highly inconvenient. However, I've noticed
that the NVIDIA kernel driver installation is able to install the
nvidia.ko module without needing a precompiled source tree, and also
VMWare is able to compile vmmon.o and vmnet.o (notice the use of the
older .o naming scheme rather than .ko) without error (all of these
successfully load into the kernel, though they taint it).

Is there a guide or howto available which describes the process without
requiring a compiled source tree?