Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Sandro "red" Mathys
<red at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:06 AM, Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 03:46:02PM +0900, Sandro red Mathys wrote:
>>> Yesterday, I updated to Josh's 2.5 kernel, then I removed kernel and
>>> kernel-drivers, only leaving kernel-core. Today, I again updates, this
>>> time 3.8 being available. Now guess what? The "install instead of
>>> update" magic worked. I know have both kernel-core packages. So I
>>> figure yum works this magic with any kernel* package.
>>
>> And this is why I should read all the mail before responding. :)
>>
>> How about the removal protection?
>
> Oh, good catch. Also, that's a funny one.
>
> So, you can't remove the currently running kernel-core. As expected.
>
> BUT, you can remove the currently running kernel/kernel-drivers.
> That's good because we want those packages to be optionally
> (un)installable but bad because if you actually require
> kernel-drivers, well, it's obviously bad.

"Require" is the word that needs further definition.

> Not sure if there's a good fix to this. We'd either limit people to
> only being able to get rid of kernel-drivers with some dancing around
> with different kernel versions and some rebooting, etc. Or we allow
> people to remove the kernel-drivers of the running kernel which
> defeats the purpose of the protection. #leSigh

I don't think we want to over-complicate things here.  Removing
-drivers from a machine, whether it's running the corresponding kernel
or not, shouldn't be a huge deal.  They might not have support for
some hotplugged device in that case.  Also, it's not really going to
be a common case for people to do.

> Oh (#2), and here, dnf actually differs from yum. dnf protects *none*
> of the packages. So that's definitely a bug and I'll report it once we
> know exactly what behavior we want (so that yum and dnf will do the
> same thing).

That's not a bug.  They did that on purpose.  There was a big thread
about it on the devel list a while ago.

josh