[CentOS-devel] (How) do others SIGs provide kernel modules?

Sun Oct 7 09:37:37 UTC 2018
Niels de Vos <ndevos at redhat.com>

Hi,

There is an oustanding request for the Storage SIG to package and
provide VDO:

> VDO (which includes kvdo and vdo) is software that provides inline
> block-level deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning
> capabilities for primary storage.

Both components ate packaged in a Fedora COPR, and a reasonable .spec
file is provided by the upstream project.

However, the kernel module is packaged with DKMS. This would result in
building the module during RPM installation, and possibly on reboot
after a kernel update.

There is a dkms package in the CBS (by Haïkel), but it is only tagged
with -candidate. I would like to know what the reasons were to not
consumer it for a release.

It seems that there is one (that I could find) package in the CBS that
provides a kernel modules (openafs-kmod by Jonathan). It utilizes DKMS
as well, but also never made it a repository for release.

Then there is the kmod package (build by Lokesh). This is an alternative
way of building kernel modules. It compiles the module in the CBS, for a
specific (sortof major) kernel version. The resulting RPM can then be
installed without the need to build it again.

My personal preference would be to provide kernel modules with the kmod
practise. But I love to hear opinions and experiences from others.

Thanks,
Niels