[OpenAFS-devel] kabi-tracking kmods

[Ken Dreyer]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Stephan Wiesand
<stephan.wiesand@desy.de> wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2012, at 00:09 , Ken Dreyer wrote:
>> 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.

Thank you, that helps me understand. So what will your approach be in
Scientific Linux for this? Also, I guess ELRepo will suffer the same
problem? RPM Fusion is looking at using kabi-tracking for kmods for
EL, which is why I'm interested.

- Ken