On 10/04/2015 10:57 AM, Ned Slider wrote:
There is no responsibility on Red Hat to maintain drivers disabled in the RHEL7 kernel, so if CentOS enables drivers for a 32-bit kernel build that are disabled by default in the RHEL kernel, then CentOS would need to take responsibility/ownership for maintaining those drivers within the CentOS kernel, backporting security fixes as necessary.
That is a very different proposition than just rebuilding upstream sources, requiring a very different skill set and resources.
Further, down the line you will most likely find that the driver won't compile when enabled. For example, the wireless stack has been updated in the RHEL7.2beta kernel from kernel-4.1-rc6, yet the b43 driver in the kernel source will still be from the original 3.10.0 branch. It's unlikely to compile and will probably need backporting from 4.1.
Your best bet is probably to backport the driver yourself and build it out of tree - a lot simpler than building a whole kernel just for one driver.
All very good points, but I have never pulled a module and built it out of tree before, and so right now the easier proposition for me is to just tweak a config file and try to rebuild the entire kernel. At some point I may try to do what you're suggesting.
I did have a look and find these directions to help me: https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BuildingKernelModules
...the above link will likely be my next step after just trying to rebuild the kernel itself.
Peter