[Fedora-packaging] Re: atrpms kernel modules

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Sun Jul 23 16:12:58 UTC 2006


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.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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