Kernel module permutation problems

[Paul Wouters]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Dan Williams wrote:

> 1) UP, SMP, hugemen, XEN
> 2) i586, i686, x86_64, em64t, ppc32, ppc64, ia64
> 3) How many past kernels to rebuild for
>
> Even with just these 3, we get at _least_ 30 different kernel module
> RPMs (3 "flavors", minimum of 5 arches, 2 past kernels).  That's a huge
> number.
>
> Questions:
>
> Is this really what we want?

I think so :(

> This is all independent of the actual specfile mechanisms and mechanics
> of rebuilding the modules.  This is simply a question of how many
> factors do we care about here.  It's not out of the question to start
> small and grow the permutations out as we go along and add more
> architectures, flavors, etc.

The way FreeS/WAN did this in the past was to build one rpm with all
flavour kernel modules, and upon installation detect which module
you need and link as the actual .ko file.

At least that limits the amounts of packages, but it was only i86
modules we cared about back then. Now there is a lot more.

One way out of this, is to only provide src.rpm's for the kernel
module packages and have people build them on their system. But
that requires installing kernel development tools.

Paul