Re: kbuild 2.5 is ready for inclusion in the 2.5 kernel

David Woodhouse
2002-05-02T15:19:20Z

kai@tp1.ruhr-uni-bochum.de said:
> > kbuild 2.5 deliberately does not support modversions, you can turn it
> > on but it does nothing. The original implementation of modversions
> > does not fit with the way that people build kernels now (apply
> > patches, change configs, rebuild without make mrproper). To do
> > modversions right needs a new version of modutils as well, there
> > is no chance of that work being started until kbuild 2.5 is in
> > the kernel.

> I would like to object here. Getting dependencies right for
> modversions is very much possible in principle, after all modversions
> are generated in a deterministic process. (It's also possible in
> practise, though it's quite a bit of work).

To what are you objecting? You aren't disagreeing with Keith here. He
merely said that there's no chance of him working on modversions until
the newer build system that's sane w.r.t. dependencies is incorporated.

> Modversions is really essential for distributions, where it's badly
> needed to keep users from causing hard to track down crashes by
> inserting self-compiled or obtained from whereever else modules into a
> kernel which was compiled with a different config.

Distributions are unlikely to be shipping 2.5 kernels. As long as
modversions can be reimplemented properly by the time 2.6 is released,
what's the harm in disabling it for a while?

It's hard enough to keep kbuild-2.5 up to date with recent kernels as it
is; let's not keep moving the goalposts by adding new requirements for the
initial adoption -- once it's in and the makefiles are maintaining
themselves, we can concentrate on reimplementing the niche features.

--
dwmw2