On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 1:56 PM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbys...@in.waw.pl> wrote: > > Hello kernel maintainers, hello Fedora developers, > > I'm looking into the split of kernel packages. The split into subpackages > seems interesting, but there are many dependencies between the packages, > so it is usual to end up with all of them installed. > > E.g. for a simple VM, by design, kernel-core contains a basic set of > modules that should be enough to boot. I see that in a standard > libvirt guest, the only modules from kernel-modules that are loaded > are for sound hardware and "usbnet", all which I'd be fine without. > > Another example: we'd like to explore building an initramfs directly > from rpms, without dracut, only systemd and a standard packages to > bring up the hardware. Some modules need to be installed, so the > kernel can load the from the initramfs, but the kernel itself should > not, since it is provided "externally" by the boot loader. > > But: > the basic modules are in one rpm with kernel-core > kernel-core Requires linux-firmware (which is 240MB) > kernel-modules Requires kernel-uname-r, which is provided by kernel-core > kernel Requires kernel-core-uname-r, kernel-modules-uname-r > > Would it be possible to make some changes: > > - split out the modules from kernel-core package into a new subpackage > kernel-basic-modules, kernel-core can Recommend or Require it
There has to be a *really* good benefit to do this, and I haven't seen one described. The more splitting we do, the more management both on the client machines and for the kernel maintainers themselves. The way modules are filtered is terrible (I wrote it, so I can say that) and requires people to keep it updated as the upstream kernel changes module dependencies. Can you describe in more detail why you need something smaller than kernel-core? I'm not understanding your usecase. > - remove the Requires on kernel-core (or change to Recommends) from > kernel-modules, so it can be installed standalone That makes no sense. The modules are unusable without the main vmlinux binary. Why would we do that and risk people making their machines unbootable? > - move the Requires:linux-firmware (or change to Recommends) from kernel-core, > have kernel Requires:linux-firmware > > I think this would be useful for playing with various minimization scenarios. This one might be feasible. We did the split before Recommends support was present. It's often been requested for the VM case. I do still have concerns that it can lead to unbootable physical machines, but if dnf defaults to installing Recommended packages that might be possible. josh _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
