[rhelv6-beta-list] kernel-release now appends the arch

[Stephan Wiesand]

On Apr 30, 2010, at 23:31 , Ned Slider wrote:

> Stephan Wiesand wrote:
>> On Apr 30, 2010, at 21:45 , Ned Slider wrote:
>>> Stephan Wiesand wrote:
>>>> On Apr 29, 2010, at 21:10 , inode0 wrote:
>>> <snip>
>>> 
>>>>> I'm sympathetic to not liking changes that affect scripts and have
>>>>> been bitten by changes in RHEL in the past but I don't really see a
>>>>> use case where `uname -r` isn't still going to return the right
>>>>> thing?! Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough.
>>>> well, imagine an environment where external kernel modules are a necessity. Ok, they almost never really are, because almost always we could tell our users to get lost and use an OS that works for them. But, even setting aside the very few real cases where this actually isn't an option, I don't like the idea.
>>>> So, please try to imagine you'd been maintaining a script that cares for updates of kernels *and* additional modules, making sure that each and every system that boots either comes up with the current kernel and all required modules available (Fedora/RHEL has *no* tool helping here - please prove me wrong) 
>>> kmodtool for building kABI-tracking kernel independent kmod (kernel module) packages? But that uses 'uname -r' too ;)
>>> 
>>> Anyway, you don't need to be rebuilding modules against every kernel - build them once with kmodtool and be done with it. Or better still, put in an RFE request to a 3rd party repo like elrepo.org for the modules you require and let someone else maintain them for you.
>> Right track, for sure. Alas, none of the modules I'm dealing with is using whitelisted ABIs only.  And btw, some of them are even closed source, I can't help it.
>> - Stephan
> 
> Right. Not much you can do about closed source, but wrt building modules that require symbols that aren't defined in the ABI whitelist, please see here:
> 
> http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo-devel/2009-September/000056.html

I still fail to see how removing the dependencies will help with making sure that any system coming up after a kernel update has a working driver for all its devices. But maybe that's just me being blind. Anyway, that's a question I should ask on the elrepo list.

> Further, I've not had a chance to thoroughly test it yet, but I think the issue might now be fixed in RHEL6beta1.

Hmm, the only "fix" would be whitelisting the entire ABI, effectively freezing the kernel for the lifetime of EL6. Now, that's not what we want either, at a 40+ months release cycle. 

- Stephan
> Hope that helps.
> 
> PS - I forgot to link to the excellent documentation available for the RHEL Driver Update Program here:
> 
> http://dup.et.redhat.com/
> http://dup.et.redhat.com/presentations/DriverUpdateProgramTechnical.pdf

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany