Feature changed by: Susanne Oberhauser (froh) Feature #305148, revision 19 Title: Automatic Compiling of Kernel Modules openSUSE-11.2: New Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Andreas Jaeger (a_jaeger) 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. Relations: - bugzilla feature (url: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=410396) Discussion: #2: Susanne Oberhauser (froh) (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. #13: Martin Zbořil (nescius) (2009-03-04 15:06:22) Dell created a dkms tool which uses gcc to compile kernel modules from source on boot if kernel is changed, some distributions are already using it for both mayor proprietary GPU driver vendors. + #14: Susanne Oberhauser (froh) (2009-03-05 00:16:25) (reply to #13) + Yah. The key reason we created KMPs instead of just using dkms was that + data center customers like deutsche bank want to get rid of a compiler + on the machine, for very valid security reasons. + KMPs are enterprise class, precompiled, pretested, well-defined code. + dkms is the fancy I compile myself "fingers crossed most time it works + if not the community helps" solution. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305148