On Thu, 2016-01-14 at 10:56 -0500, Neal Gompa 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 doesn't have a stable API. Nothing guarantees the kernel module would work with newer kernel version. As is usually the case, it doesn't and it either break user's system or leaves it outdated, both of which are horrible user experience. > Best regards, > Neal > > [0]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1228897 > -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
