Re: Too many kernels?

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Axel Thimm wrote:
| Hi,
|
| currently ATrpms builds kmdls for the following RHEL5/CentOS5 kernels
| (actually for CentOS it also builds plus for plus kernels, but let's
| keep the discussion simple):
|
|     el5/2.6.18-92.1.6.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-92.1.1.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-92.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.21.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.19.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.14.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.13.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.6.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-53.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.15.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.10.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.8.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.6.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.4.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.3.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.1.1.el5 \
|     el5/2.6.18-8.el5 \
|
| Similar for RHEL4/3. This slows down kmdl updates as say for a new
| nvidia driver one need to build kmdls for all these kernels in all
| flavours/archs etc.
|
| I start to think whether these kernels are indeed being all used to
| the extend of justifying full kmdl support. Maybe it would make sense
| to keep the full last series (2.6.18-92* above) and the highest one
| from the series before (2.6.18-53.1.21.el5 and 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5).
|
| Or is there any other idea? What are Red Hat's, CentOS' policies wrt
| support of kernels? ATrpms should probably just copy that policy and
| drop kernel support once the respective upstream support drops it.

Red Hat suggests building once for each flavor/arch combo and being done
with it. As long as the required kernel symbols are present, they'll
keep working. You make the kernel module deps on the necessary kernel
symbols, which are provided by the kernel package. For example, the
packages provided here...

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2007-0654.html

...are designed to work with any version-release of a given arch/flavor
RHEL5 kernel.

But then maybe you already knew that, and don't like that scheme much...
:) But that's what's recommended to all ISV's who build kernel modules
for RHEL5, and so far, its worked out great. Of course, if some out of
tree driver requires a symbol not on the whitelist (i.e., not in the
kernel's Provides:), you lose, but...

- --
Jarod Wilson
jwilson-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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