On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Neal Gompa <ngomp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all, > > I've recently been wondering why we haven't allowed kernel module > packages in Fedora since Fedora 8. I've tried searching through our > wiki and the mailing list, but I haven't come up with any concrete > reasons for why we disallow them. > > If it is perhaps the issue of keeping things in sync with kernels we > provide (that is, maintainers didn't/couldn't keep up with new kernels > being pushed during a release cycle), then I think the situation has > changed. > > We have two tools that can help us in this regard: akmod and Koschei, > both came after our policy change to disallow kernel modules. > > akmod is essentially DKMS except that instead of just building the > kernel module, it'll build a kernel module package that matches an > exact kernel release. Some of the weird problems that happen with DKMS > don't seem to happen with akmod because of this. There's an argument > for the akmod functionality being part of RPM and perhaps that should > be the case. In any case, I don't see any particular reason akmod > couldn't be brought into Fedora. > > On the other end, we have Koschei, which tracks and rebuilds things > automatically (but doesn't submit automatically). It should be > possible to adapt what Koschei does to be able to automatically > generate new kmod packages tied to a particular kernel release and > make it easy for a maintainer to turn that into something that can be > submitted as part of a kernel update bundle to Bodhi. > > The biggest blocker I know of with kmods (at least dkms and akmod > style ones) is we have a bug where DNF picks the wrong kernel-devel > package at depsolve time[0] (this also appears to affect installing > kernel-modules-extras too). > > Aside from the DNF issue, is there anything else I'm missing in > relation to kmods in Fedora?
The kernel team does not support their inclusion in Fedora. In brief, it is asking to allow an out-of-tree, non-upstream, unreviewed chunk of code into potentially every Fedora install that has no restrictions on what it can do and can easily crash a machine or worse. If the code in question _was_ reviewed and headed into the upstream kernel tree, the kernel team still would not support building it as a separate stand-alone module. There are buildsystem issues I mentioned in another email, but the plain fact is that in that specific case it simply wouldn't be worth packaging separately. Something clearly on its way upstream would get pulled into the kernel package itself as patches and built with every other module we provide. This is a major part of why we disallowed them in the past and that was before any of the existing kernel team members were on the team yet. Our stance has not changed over time or with the introduction of new team members. josh -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
