Re: Observation re third parties supporting Debian kernels

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 03:58:31PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > > He did mention that they'd looked into supporting Debian, but slammed the
> > > lid back down on it after they had discovered (and I'm paraphrasing)
> > > "multiple kernels with the same version number".
> > 
> > Seems like uninformed non-sense, but then maybe due to the previous messy
> > situation. I think these guys are lying when speakign about linux support
> > anyway, and only mean linux/x86 anyway.
> 
> Possibly (uninformed). I didn't go into details with the guy. I don't even
> know what version of Debian they'd looked at, and yes, Linux/x86 is
> absolutely correct. These guys are coming from the world where there were
> only commercial Unices, so in that case, there'd be one commercial Unix per
> CPU architecture, so the model of distributing binaries would work. I'm not
> suggesting that it's a good model...

Indeed.

> > We provide the linux-headers apckage to make it as easy to build external
> > modules against those kernels as possible, so it should be no real problem.
> 
> As I said to the guy from CA, they're probably best doing something like
> what nVidia do with their binary video driver - compile a shim against the
> installed kernel's headers, and have their binary crap talk to that, but I
> don't know enough about their product...

Nope, we have the infrastructure, so they can easily enough produce real
debian packages for all debian supported flavours. The idea is to :

  for a given set of architectures (probably i386 and amd64 for them, but
  maybe they could do powerpc and ia64 too), build-depends on the
  linux-headers-<version> package, which will :

    1) pull in all linux-headers-<version>-<abi>-<flavour> for that arch
    2) have the list of flavours in /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-<abi>/flavours

  They can then iterate on the flavours list, and do a build of the modules
  for each of them. This only need to set :

    KSRC=/lib/modules/<version>-<abi>-<flavour>/build

  and the packages will work just fine.

  They can then create a simple module package for all supported arches, which
  depends on the linux-image of that flavour with :

    Depends: linux-image-<version>-<abi>-<flavour>

> > I agree that the pre-2.6.12 situation was messy, but the new common
> > infrastructure should be no major problem for those guys.
> > 
> 
> Well it'd be interesting to see if either party was interested in talking
> about it...

Huh ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther