[Fedora-packaging] Kernel modules packaged for dkms

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Tue Oct 10 08:00:23 UTC 2006


On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Matthias Saou wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote :
>
> [...]
>> Well, dkms kernel-modules are not directly forbidden (at least it's not
>> written down somewhere), but we choose to use kmod for kernel-module
>> packages -- so they are not allowed AFAICS.
>
> Then I'd like the people who pushed the kmod scheme to be accepted to
> try and get it to be 100% functional ASAP, as the whole build server
> side, to get automated rebuilds for all newly released kernels is quite
> far from being implemented (unless I'm mistaken).

IIRC dkms was never *really* considered for the kernel module standard, 
everybody was too busy arguing over uname-r in name, how to handle 
debuginfo packages, what kind of macro magic to include, how many kernels 
to build for in buildsys, how to teach the kmod scheme to buildsys etc.

>> And I don't think that we should change this as it helps people not much
>> if we put two or more competing standards in Fedora Core/Extras.
>>
>>> [...]
>>
>> I'm not in general against rebuilding modules on the users system -- but
>> it should be a option (e.g. for rawhide users), not the norm. I actually
>> implemented a small script once that did what most users want -- simply
>> rebuild the kmod-foo.srpm during boot up for the running kernel. I can
>> work on it again if people are interested. It did what we are interested
>> in in 5k -- dkms does a lot more what we don't need in 100k.
>
> But dkms is quite solid, handles errors in a user friendly way...
> and "just works" overall while keeping things simple. Sure, the actual
> modules aren't in the rpmdb, but are easily identifiable (dkms.conf). I
> would really prefer to have all kernel modules cleanly installed with
> rpm, believe me, but I'm simply not comfortable with any of the current
> packaging schemes.
>
> I packaged acx100 as acx-kmod a few months ago :
> http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/acx-kmod-common/
> http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/acx-kmod/
>
> Honestly, it stopped me from wanting to package more kernel
> modules... :-( Yesterday, I packaged the newer tiacx as dkms-tiacx :
> http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/dkms-tiacx/
>
> ...and it made me want to package _more_ kernel modules! The most
> painful part for kmod is getting a build environment ready to rebuild
> the module for all the different kernels. The whole complexity of the
> spec file filled with macros and stuff generated from the kmodtool
> script doesn't help either. I'm sure that if I had wrote it, I wouldn't
> see it as being so complex... but I didn't.

Amen brother :) I've been intending to have a look at dkms for a long 
time, your post on the subject finally pushed me to actually do so. After 
converting a couple of kernel module packages (internal stuff at work) 
over to dkms, I'm simply loving it.

It's going to save me a helluva lot of time wasted on dealing with 
rebuilding kernel modules for this-and-that kernel, please the 
propellerheads running their own custom kernels and removes pretty much 
the impossibility of trying to deal with kernel module dependencies in 
some semi-correct way.

My only regret now is that I haven't looked at DKMS earlier :)

 	- Panu -




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