[OpenAFS-devel] kabi-tracking kmods

[Stephan Wiesand]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 00:09 , Ken Dreyer wrote:

> Re-reading through the kabi thread[1] from last month, I'm trying to
> understand: Is kABI tracking a lost cause with OpenAFS? Is it just
> better to rebuild for every kernel update?

To me, that seems to be the bottom line :-(

> My small experience with kabi kmod packages is limited to ATI's video
> drivers and OpenAFS. It has worked sometimes, but other times I've had
> to rebuild against RHEL 6's newer kernels in order to get a module to
> work properly. I'm wondering what's the best direction overall.

To my understanding: Unless a module uses whitelisted symbols only, =
kabi-tracking kmod's aren't safe across minor EL6 releases, at least. =
They may be safe within minor releases. Alas, the current way of =
packaging does not even support that kind of use at all: There's no way =
to have more than one module installed at a time, and the single module =
will be made available to kernels in which it may render the system =
completely unusable, or cause any other kind of problems. As Simon =
pointed out, this could well affect data integrity, making the issue =
really serious in the openafs case. Taking the risk may be ok for a =
display driver. For a filesystem, it probably isn't.

- Stephan

> - Ken
>=20
> [1] =
https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2012-August/018944.html