akmods for EL-5?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 15:35 +0200, Denis Leroy wrote:
> Andrea Musuruane wrote:
> > 2008/9/5 Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com>:
> >> I need to build my akmod for EL-5.  Will there be a port of akmods stuff to
> >> EL-5?
> > 
> > Is there a sense in having akmod for EL? AFAIK the EL kernel is ABI
> > stable. Therefore kmod should be enough.
> 
> No the EL kernel is API stable, not ABI stable. Kernel modules always 
> have a strict dependency on the exact kernel they were compiled against, 
> and RHEL does push kernel updates regularly (although not as frequently 
> as Fedora).

Incorrect.

The RHEL kernel *is* ABI-stable for a whitelisted set of symbols. Some
3rd-party kernel modules use symbols not on the whitelist, and thus not
guaranteed stable, but it *is* entirely possible to build a kernel
module against the RHEL5 GA kernel and have it load and run fine on the
latest 5.3 development kernel, if it only uses whitelisted symbols.




-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com