kmods and Fedora
Hello all,
I've recently been wondering why we haven't allowed kernel module
packages in Fedora since Fedora 8. I've tried searching through our
wiki and the mailing list, but I haven't come up with any concrete
reasons for why we disallow them.
If it is perhaps the issue of keeping things in sync with kernels we
provide (that is, maintainers didn't/couldn't keep up with new kernels
being pushed during a release cycle), then I think the situation has
changed.
We have two tools that can help us in this regard: akmod and Koschei,
both came after our policy change to disallow kernel modules.
akmod is essentially DKMS except that instead of just building the
kernel module, it'll build a kernel module package that matches an
exact kernel release. Some of the weird problems that happen with DKMS
don't seem to happen with akmod because of this. There's an argument
for the akmod functionality being part of RPM and perhaps that should
be the case. In any case, I don't see any particular reason akmod
couldn't be brought into Fedora.
On the other end, we have Koschei, which tracks and rebuilds things
automatically (but doesn't submit automatically). It should be
possible to adapt what Koschei does to be able to automatically
generate new kmod packages tied to a particular kernel release and
make it easy for a maintainer to turn that into something that can be
submitted as part of a kernel update bundle to Bodhi.
The biggest blocker I know of with kmods (at least dkms and akmod
style ones) is we have a bug where DNF picks the wrong kernel-devel
package at depsolve time[0] (this also appears to affect installing
kernel-modules-extras too).
Aside from the DNF issue, is there anything else I'm missing in
relation to kmods in Fedora?
Best regards,
Neal
[0]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1228897
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