On 5/22/19 7:10 AM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:49 Matthias Eckermann wrote:
2-Is the SLE connection to kernels in Leap responsible for extra modules, some that otherwise wouldn't be included in a FOSS distro?
More the opposite: SUSE Linux Enterprise by default ships significantly less modules than openSUSE does, as we split off a package called "kernel-default-extra" which contains modules that a FOSS distro as openSUSE needs/wants to have, but we do not necessarily can declare fully enterprise supported (yet), e.g. kernel modules from "staging".
Even with kernel-default-extra included, there is a lot of modules which we only build for openSUSE kernels, not SLE ones. I have to admit, though, that I expected the ratio to be higher than it is:
SLE15 3219 openSUSE-15.0 3921 Tumbleweed 4108
Back to the original question: there are probably be some modules which only make sense in SLE kernels but the number is certainly much lower than number of modules which only make sense in openSUSE. And it's often useful to be able to boot an openSUSE kernel on enterprise hardware for testing purpose.
On the other hand, I would agree that we certainly build a lot of modules in openSUSE kernel packages which no openSUSE user actually uses and most likely also quite a few which people couldn't use even if they wanted to (e.g. specific sensor chips which are not used in any x86_64 or i586 system). The hard part is to tell which modules we could drop safely, unfortunately the config option description are rarely helpful.
What makes this more difficult is that many of these sensors and devices don't *have* to be native to system hardware. There are e.g. USB <-> i2c devices that mean that literally any i2c device could appear on any architecture. Then there are the users who want to run openSUSE on commodity tablets, where these sorts of devices /do/ appear natively. I don't think we should necessarily ship fewer modules but, similar to the discussion about the size of kernel-firmware, we should probably investigate having additional module packages. -Jeff -- Jeff Mahoney SUSE Labs