dkms + kmp

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

Now after FESCO granted resurrection and enable by default of DKMS I've 
been researching and scratching my head bit over this one what 5 years 
ago LF created working group with representatives from Novell, RH, 
Canonical,Dell and IBM which comes up with kmp

The outcome of this is amongst other things...

* kmp rpm macros [1]
* Jockey [2]
* driver db spec being created [1]

Suse rejects dkms inclusion in the distribution [4]

Comment from S.O in that suse request

"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."

"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."

This indicates that we should not be shipping dkms et all so does anyone 
know anything about the current status on this in the working group?

What our ( project ) status is in this?

What the way forward is supposed to be?

JBG

1. 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/driver-backport/kmp_macros 

2. https://launchpad.net/jockey
3. 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/driver-backport/onlinedriverdb
4. https://features.opensuse.org/305148