I am starting to think that debian has completely broken support for compiling out of tree kernel modules as of 2.6.29 now.
It used to be, that if you needed to know if a certain function used one style or another, then you could do a compile test against the kernel headers and see if it worked or not, and try until you found the style that worked with the given kernel version. With the removal of the symlinks in 2.6.29, this is no longer possible. Now if you already knew which style to use, then you could just compile with kbuild and be happy, but well, you don't know yet so you need to find out somehow. Nvidia's solution has been to use a script to do compile tests. This doesn't work now. Some others have used #ifdef's that check the kernel version and rely on which kernel version changed the behaviour and go by that. I have now done that for the nvidia package, and it does work for 2.6.29 and 2.6.26, but not 2.6.27 and 2.6.28. What happened is that debian's 2.6.27 and 2.6.28 packages apparently contained a patch that changed the syntax of the function smp_call_function, to the 3 argument version that now appears in 2.6.29, while the pure kernel from kernel.org only uses the 3 argument version starting with 2.6.29, while 2.6.28 and older use the 4 argument version of the function. So now I can either code the #ifdef's to look for the kernel.org version and assume 3 argument smp_call_function starts at 2.6.29, and 4 argument is used for lower versions, or I can use the debian kernel's and say 2.6.27 and higher uses the 3 argument and 2.6.26 and lower use 4 argument. Either way, someone is going to loose. Debian kernel users or kernel.org kernel users. I can't support both. So unless someone can tell me how to test the syntax of a function in terms of how many arguments it takes and such, using compile time checks (ie #ifdef's), then this simply can't work. The only thing that did seem to work with these kind of API changes being done to the kernel with patches was to run compile tests against the headers, which means the symlink tree must be restored. So does anyone have a solution to this mess? I highly doubt debian's kernel maintainers will promise to never ever add a patch that changes kernel function call syntax again (as was clearly done in 2.6.27 and 2.6.28), so some way to test is required. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
