[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

[Skylar Thompson]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> It's useful because it will automatically build and install existing
>> kernel modules for newly-installed kernels. Many vendors ship drivers as
>> RPMs separate from the kernel, so they won't get updated when the kernel
>> is updated unless you use something like dkms.
>
> interesting.  the distro-based approach is that when you update your
> kernel, the package manager will naturally also update any packages
> which are dependent on the kernel version.  that certainly works fine
> if you're using normal (binary, precompiled) packages.  I guess the
> issue with rebuilding packages is that they are, in some sense,
> version-flexible (can be rebuilt for new kernels).  the issue, though
> is that you don't know whether the package will still build for the
> new kernel until you try - it might have dependencies on a symbol that
> gets removed from the kernel update, for instance.

Right, although distributions like RHEL do a good job of keeping the
kernel unchanged from an API perspective within a given release.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar at cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/


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