[OpenAFS-devel] Re: kabi-tracking kmods

[Andrew Deason]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:38:31 -0500
Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> wrote:

> 2) RHEL defines which kabi functions are 'stable'

I'm not sure if you understand what Ken is talking about. As far as I
can tell, Red Hat's intent is that this is supposed to still work even
for things that do not stick to any "stable" whitelist of functions (for
RHEL6 and beyond). So if something not "stable" changes, the kernel will
recognize that the relevant kernel module is not compatible, and you
need to recompile the thing. So we're not supposed to need to stick to a
stable ABI.

But as the thread that Ken linked shows, it doesn't seem to work.  We're
not sure why it doesn't work for that particular case, and Red Hat's new
kernel patching policies make it difficult to figure out. I think it's
hard to say how often that will reoccur without knowing what actually
broke.

It's of course safer to just recompile for any version change, but if
that were acceptable to everyone I expect this kabi stuff wouldn't exist
in the first place. I personally don't find it "worth it" to try and
figure this out at the moment, but I've treated Linux's lack of
interface stability/design as something to just 'live with' for awhile,
so it doesn't bother me so much.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net