On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Thomas Bächler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The module-init-tools have had this feature for a while and I just wanted to > tell you about how we can use it: > > The modules contained in the updates/ subdirectory in your module directory > are always preferred over any other modules. Thus, you can put updated > modules into it which supercede the ones installed by our kernel. This is > great, I'll just give some examples: > > - The compat-wireless package uses it > That's how I know about it. compat-wireless puts a complete new mac80211 > tree with drivers into updates/. This means it is easy to get updated > wireless drivers without conflicting with the stock kernel and without > having to rebuild the whole kernel. > > - ALSA updates > ALSA has been known to be a bitch. Sometimes the drivers in the stock Linux > kernel are out of date and an updated driver will help. Now, we could > provide a PKGBUILD via AUR which installs the latest ALSA drivers to > updates/ - this would give a user the possibility to use an updated alsa > without having to rebuild the kernel, conflict with the kernel or having to > delete files and confuse pacman. > > - Random patches to drivers > It has happened that users wanted a particular feature enabled or changed > in a particular driver. There is the phc undervolt patch and there is some > toshiba-bluetooth patch still in our kernel. Now I don't like forcing > patched drivers on people who don't need it, and generally, our community > likes vanilla kernels more. With the updates/ directory it is possible to > provide these special cases via PKGBUILDs/AUR - provided the change is only > in the module(s) in question, one could patch it, build it and put it into > the updates/ directory. Without having a patched kernel, the users could be > happy - again, no kernel rebuilding or hacky conflicting. (In the above > cases, only the acpi-cpufreq resp. the toshiba-acpi modules are modified ... > nothing is modified in the kernel itself). > > I already plan to maintain compat-wireless as a binary package. I will also > put an alsa-driver-updates package into the AUR. And I will try to package > the modified toshiba-acpi module so I can drop the patch from the kernel (I > will also put this in AUR then). > > I hope this will make life easier for us and for many users in our > community - it is a much cleaner thing than patching the kernel all the > time.
Big +1 from me, thanks Thomas. -Dan
