Building modules for Debian sparc kernels

[Arne Nordmark <nordmark@mech.kth.se>]

Hello,

When building kernel modules (specifically the OpenAFS module) to match
the kernels in the Debian archive for i386 and sparc, some questions
came up.

For the i386 architecture, there is a separate kernel-headers package
for each kernel flavour, so building using these should produce working
modules. On sparc, there is only one kernel-headers package (for the
sun4cmd subarch?). Is building a kernel module say for sun4u-smp with
these headers guarateed to work? If not, one should probably have to get
the correct version of the kernel-source pachage (but this may have been
replaced in the archive) and the kernel-image source package (for
patches), so that way is not so desirable.

Another thing is that the kernel-image packages for sparc has the
sub-architecture in the package name, but not in the /lib/modules path.
The variables passed by make-kpkg to build a kernel module package does
not seem to be enough to inform about this situation, so the buildt
package will either miss the sun4xxx in the package name and kernel
dependencies, or have it in the /lib/modules path, dpeneding of how
make-kpkg is called, so in either case the .deb file will have to edited
by hand. For i386, there is no problem, as the flavour is present both
in the package name and the /lib/modules path.

Arne