Re: /lib/modules/kabi-4.0-0*

[Jason Baron <jbaron redhat com>]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, Björn Augustsson wrote:

> Hello folks!
> 
> Recompiling third party modules after every kernel upgrade is a
> constant PITA. 
> 
> Now, there's a directory called kabi-4.0-0 in /lib/modules/. 
> I remeber vaguely from somewhere that RH maintains a compatble 
> kernel ABI within a release, and I guess this has something to
> do with it.
> 
> But it's not clear to me how it works. Is there any special tricks
> to make modules use this? Can I just take a standard module, built 
> against, say, 2.6.5-11, and move the .ko into the kabi dir and have
> it DTRT? Or what?
> 
> I haven't found any docs on this, and as far as I can deduce from a
> running system, neither module-init-tools not mkinitrd knows anything
> about the kabi directories.
> 
> Anyone?

3rd party modules that are compiled against any of the kernel-devel pkgs 
should continue to work fine against any later kernels without having to 
re-compile. If this is not the case for, we want to know about it. We have 
a number of practices in place to make sure that this works.

thanks,

-Jason