Current status of kernel modules

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 14.10.2007 20:22, Kelly wrote:
> On Sunday, October 14, 2007 1:53:42 pm Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> On 14.10.2007 18:40, Stewart Adam wrote:
>>> What are your comments, ideas or opinions about packaging kernel
>>> modules? Fedora has technically banned them AFAIK, but that won't go
>>> well for the proprietary drivers... Should we have both kmod and dkms
>>> available, or maybe something else?
>> Some notes from my side:
>>
>> * I'm fine with either using both kmods and dkms for all modules or
>> banning modules for the start completely and leaving them in freshrpms
>> and livna for now. The latter is *iirc* what thias suggested last time
>> we talked about it
>>
>> * "or maybe something else" -- I have some stuff here on my machine that
>> can dynamically rebuild and install kmod.src.rpms. But well, it's not
>> ready for primetime yet. Other work (mainly for rpmfusion) kept me away
>> from it :-/
> 
> I would say DKMS is the better way to go, because it's literally "fire and 
> forget" 

Offloading trouble to users (in case a module does not build for a new
kernel), forcing them to install compilers, having files on harddisk
that are not in the rpmdb, directories and files that stay around after
uninstalling and "we are no gentoo" are IMHO more then good reasons to
not for dkms only. OTOH dkms serves some use cases, that's why I think
having them in addition can't hurt. Users can choose what matches their
use-case best.

>- using KMOD would require updating the modules every time the kernel 
> is updated.  Livna's past history in this regard tends to show why this is a 
> bad approach (it wasn't unusual for me to update the kernel, only to find 
> that the modules hadn't been updated).

Multiple ten-thousands of users seem to be happy with what livna was
doing (that's the # of download for kmods in total per kernel). Livna in
 the past months did updates within 12 hours after the kernel gets
shipped. Often quicker, so it hit users systems often before their
mirror had it...

CU
knurd