Feature changed by: Susanne Oberhauser
Feature #305148, revision 3
Title: Automatic Compiling of Kernel Modules
openSUSE-11.2: New
Priority
Requester: Important
Requested by: Andreas Jaeger
Partner organization: openSUSE.org
Description:
The Standard Linux-Kernel provides a lot of hardware drivers/kernel
modules. Nevertheless there are still devices not supported by the
kernel.
If a user compiles a kernel module by himself, he has to redo this step
after each kernel update (if he is aware at all, that this step is
needed). My idea was to install kernel-source, kernel-syms, gcc and
make with each standard installation and to define a standard directory
for the source code of kernel modules, e.g /usr/src/updates.
When a Kernel Update is done, the system looks on boot in
/usr/src/updates for directories and does there a 'make' and 'make
install'. (build a kmp-package ?)
If this could become a standard for other distributions (LSB) as well
and corresponding init scripts would exist, third party kernel modules
could be installed automagically after extracting code to
/usr/src/update, so there would be some kind of standard for installing
external kernel modules.
+ Discussion:
+ #2: Susanne Oberhauser (2008-08-04 19:47:06)
+ The linux foundation has dedicated a workgroup
+ (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Driver_Backport) to this topic.
+ In this workgroup we have active Novell, RH, canonical and dell and
+ IBM.
+ We have agreed to focus our energies for the distributions to
+ precompiled modules, as that is the only means to assert predictable
+ behaviour in case of kernel updates.
+ Without that, a recompile may (and sometimes will) fail. depending on
+ the module this will leave the system in a non-bootable state.
+ For that reason we've identified dkms as a a great tool help with the
+ backport and developer build of backported modules, or modules that are
+ on their way into mainline, still, but we've also concluded that source
+ distribution to end users does more harm than good to Linux
+ distribution users as a failing kernel update is hard to recover from.
+ The workgroup has agreed to develop a simple standard format to feed
+ driver tarballs and backport patches into dkms, and that can indeed be
+ used to automate the build, but we believe it should be used in
+ something like the build service, not on the end user system, to avoid
+ unexpected, hard to recover from failures after kernel updates.
--
openSUSE Feature:
https://features.opensuse.org/?rm=feature_show&id=305148
