[ATrpms-users] FESCo Meeting

[Axel Thimm]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 12:05:53PM -0600, Richi Plana wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 19:55 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > We had an irc meeting a year ago when I tried to convince Fedora that
> > kmods are broken and that kmdls should be introduced. It was mainly
> > torpedoed by Thorsten Leemhouis, and I don't have the nerve and time
> > to waste part of my life again. :(
> 
> Perhaps he'll have a change of heart. Or other engineers will see your
> point now.

Thorsten made me leave EPEL and also caused the split in rpmfusion vs
rpmrepo. I'd doubt that there is a change of heart.

> > See also
> > 
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AxelThimm/kmdls
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AxelThimm/kmdls/kmods_vs_kmdls_at_a_glance
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AxelThimm/kmdls/voting
> > 
> > Don't worry, even if fesco shoots down kmods (which would be a good
> > thing, kmods are a broken implementation to start with), kmdls will
> > stay.
> 
> That'll be sad. Instead of being able to come up with the possibility of
> coming up with a spin of Fedora with optimized kernel modules for their
> target audience or even be able to have just the needed modules for ones
> system (if one is savvy enough) via yum and rpm, you'll end up with a
> monolithic kernel with all the modules in the kernel tree installed.
> 
> With regards to kmdl, that'll only be true for some modules and modules
> that aren't in the kernel tree.
> 
> *sigh*

Well, you're free to enter the fesco discussion arguing in favour of
kmdls, I know I won't as even if I had the energy left I'm just
packing my stuff to relocate and won't be online for 1 week+.

The point is that kernel modules outside the kernel package are not
seen in favour, not becasue the packaging sucks, but because the
kernel masters at Red Hat/Fedora lose control over what kernel space
bits run and are afraid of bug reports that were induced by kernel
parts that they didn't package.

There is some truth in this, and the bad kmod implementation didn
t help persuade them to accept this kind of packaging, but OTOH we're
talking about Linux, an open system which is not to be controlled by
vendors, but by users, so an all-in-one-kernel approach is
semantically wrong to start with.

But still whatever the kernel rpm will ship, if there is need to ship
extrenal stuff the kmdls will not be affected by this decision. Of
course it would had been nice if kmlds had been adopted by Fedora, but
they haven't and with people at the edge of banning any kmdl-like
setup pushing them off the clip, one won't manage to get it into Fedora.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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