Re: [RFC] Rebuild external kernel modules on kernel change

[Koen Kooi <k.kooi@student.utwente.nl>]

On 01-06-09 18:58, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 03:31:25PM +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> For beagleboard I have a few things I need to rebuild everytime the
>> kernel changes:
>>
>> * powervr kerneldrivers
>> * sdma kernel module
>> * dmai kernel module
>> * codec-engine
>>
>> And I have roughly two kinds of kernel changes:
>>
>> 1) version upgrade (e.g. 2.6.29 ->  2.6.29)
>
> Based on the rest of the email, I assume you mean 2.6.28 ->  2.6.29

right.

>> 2) config changes (e.g. enable ethernet bridging)
>
> So, by coincidence I had this thread around still.  For (1), you already
> have kernel-abiversion, but maybe we need some helpers to make this more
> useful?  For (2) that's not true unless you're changing one of the
> variables that actually changes the running kernel abi (which isn't
> caught in kernel-abiversion file).  This shouldn't be a frequent
> operation.

2) is *very* hard to track down, e.g. people don't expect that enabling 
netfilter as modules breaks external wifi drivers since struct sk_buff 
will change (ask nokia 770 tablet users).
I bet there are a lot more cases where kernel runtime abi changes, so 
every kernel PR bump will trigger a rebuild *and* (here's comes the most 
important bit) an automatic PR bump for recipes using module*.bbclass.

So far I've only seen suggestions that will trigger a rebuild of recipes 
using module*bbclass, but no solutions for automagic version changes so 
that the package manager will pick it up as well.

regards,

Koen