>>>>> On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Peter Wemm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> A few key suggestions for people still along for the ride:
>
> 1: When you've got a good running kernel that you're happy with, do yourself
> a big favour and copy it from /kernel to /kernel.ok or something like that.
> So, when you manage to get a bad /kernel and /kernel.old, you've still got
> a fallback that doesn't mean resorting to a fixit disk boot.
This reminds me of something I wanted to ask about. A little while
back I made the typical junior mistake of building/installing a new
kernel without doing the make install of the related modules. In my
case, the crash came from kernfs and it was easy to boot single-user
and comment out a line in fstab.
But my question is with the trend towards more module-ization of the
kernel, does saving a /kernel.old make sense without saving a
/modules.old? Should the config-generated Makefile for the kernel
have a target to build and install the new modules as well (as opposed
to installing them with make world)? Should we install modules into
some path identified by a kernel version (whatever that means
exactly)?
The extreme end of this line of logic is the Linux module hashing
mechanism, which I've never fully understood. My experience with it
is that it can prevent you from using a binary-only module (AFS is the
one I'm thinking of) even if the interfaces haven't really changed.
It seems like a poor substitute for proper management and versioning
of kernel interfaces.
I suppose much of this becomes a non-issue outside of -current, and
maybe that's why no one has seemed worried about it. Even in -stable,
though, I suppose you could have incompatible kernel interfaces
introduced that might break modules. It just seems to me that one
should consider /kernel plus /modules/* to be more of unit.
Thanks for any insights.
Tom Pavel
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~pavel/
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