kernel versioning

[dragoran]

Paul Wouters wrote:

>On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Axel Thimm wrote:
>
>  
>
>>upstream kernels that are release candidates or git sub-rcs etc. are
>>versioned in FC/RHEL based on the previous stable kernel release,
>>e.g. FC5's 2.6.16-rc5-git9 kernel is released as 2.6.15.
>>
>>I generally think that's a good idea (e.g. it *is* 2.6.15 with patches
>>towards 2.6.16 and not yet 2.6.16, and the user is not confused that
>>he's already running 2.6.16).
>>
>>But tons of kernel module projects check on the version of the kernel
>>and trigger different code bits. These projects depend on the
>>versioning to decide whether some features exist or not.
>>
>>This results to funny external Fedora-patches to these projects that
>>only last a kernel release and are troublesome to maintain.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, this is a nightmare for openswan's KLIPS module.
>
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>>So there is a wish to keep the versioning in the top level Makefile as
>>vanilla ships it. That way the checks will be more accurate and
>>users/upstream/packagers will have less to worry about, less
>>Fedora-only patching and so on.
>>    
>>
>
>That is going to be confusing too.
>
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>>Any thoughts on how to make everyone happy? :)
>>    
>>
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>I have no idea :(
>
>Paul
>  
>
A solution is not to check the kernel version but to check for 
features/apis they need.
the (closed) nvidia driver does this for the wrapper part and it seems 
to work fine.