Hi,

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 11:54:03AM +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> dkms is really simple and the per system bugs are rather hypothetical and 
> haven't been a problem so far. I'm not saying it can't happen but things 
> are less complicated overall now.

well, the nvidia dkms have often proven to be a pain and often break
kernel upgrades, especially when your screen has gone away. Not that
kmdls and their absence in the same situation are any improvement :)

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 11:56:27AM +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> I'm not saying you don't. But they may not be available yet. And what 
> about the fastrack kernels or the linville kernels that are available as 
> well. dkms transparantly supports all. Especially the dkms-fuse package 
> supports 2.4 kernels as well.

Fasttrack is supported at ATrpms (in fact anything that ATrpms has a
kernel copy of is, until previously even ccrma kernels), linville not,
mainly due to lack of demand. Most people with special kernel needs
just rpmbuild --rebuild from the src.rpm. I'm sometimes getting demand
for centosplus kernels, which may get into the game now that I stared
mirroring centos.

But let me give a general rant regarding both kmdls, dkms and any
other kernel module packgaing scheme: Of course when a new kernel
update breaks its API both systems will miserably break down. And
sadly RHEL4 had major wireless ext updates in the core with subminor
kernel rpm releases always managing to break wireless kmdl builds. The
fact that only half the wext 18 or similar were backported didn't help
either, and several "rhel4 hacks" had to be introduced to fool the
packages that they should assume the wext of version such and such. :/

As said this breaks all packaging schemes as it requires human
intervention to adjust the code, and this is the main work in
mainatining kernel modules packages. If such things don't happen (and
the RHEL5 updates haven't yet done such backports) kmdls and dkms work
fine. Let's hope RHEL5 keeps better ABI stability than RHEL4.

(Sorry if RHEL4 kernel maintainers feel ranted upon, I understand that
their backporting was for good reasons, e.g. to add better wireless
support to RHEL4, still the ABI suffered too often)

> Great to hear ! I bet we'll discuss this on LinuxTag as well :)

 :)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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