kernel-modules-extra and GFS2

[Steven Whitehouse]

Hi,

On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 07:19 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 10:55 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:52:19AM +0100, Steven Whitehouse wrote:
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> > I've had some reports recently that appeared to suggest that in F17,
> >> > GFS2 was no longer being supported by the kernel. Having investigated
> >> > this, it appears that the root cause is that the gfs2.ko module has been
> >> > moved to a package called kernel-modules-extra (although the kernel RPM
> >> > still contains the directory in which the gfs2 module sits, which is a
> >> > bit odd - why package an empty directory?)
> >> >
> >> > Now, I'm wondering whether I should add a dependency on
> >> > kernel-modules-extra in the gfs2-utils package?
> >>
> >> Why not just open a BZ requesting that gfs2 be moved back into the
> >> main kernel RPM. IMHO having gfs2 in a separate kernel RPM just creates
> >> unnecessary complexity/pain for users.
> >
> > Well that is one possibility - I'm trying to find the documentation that
> > explains the criteria for modules being moved into the
> > kernel-modules-extra package and I've not found any so far....
> 
> Essentially, it's:
> 
> "Things that are not widely used in a typical Fedora setup, or things
> that we might disable entirely but are moving to see if there are users
> that notice."
> 
> GFS2 falls into the first set, not the second.
> 
Yes, but this makes no sense at all.... looking at the selection that
has been made we have:

 o DLM in the main kernel package
 o OCFS2 and GFS2 - the only two in-kernel users of DLM in
kernel-modules-extra

I know that cLVM also uses DLM, but from userland and I wonder just how
many people use cLVM who don't use of the cluster filesystems - probably
a few, but most likely not a huge number. Perhaps more importantly, DLM
depends on SCTP and SCTP is only in kernel-modules-extra, so I think
this needs a rethink.

> > However, if that is the correct solution, then I'm quite happy with it,
> > but it isn't immediately obvious as to whether it is or not,
> 
> We can move it back if needs be.  Honestly, we might wind up just
> disabling the rest of the stuff contained in there and dropping the
> sub-package entirely.  We're still kind of undecided on whether it's
> worth doing at all.  Thus far there have been 3 requests to move a
> module back.  The rest seem to be unnoticed.
> 
> josh

I can certainly open a bug to request a more sane assignment of modules
to packages, but just wanted to be sure of the criteria so that I am
asking for the correct things,

Steve.