Re: build and distribute Linux drivers as part of a GNU automake project

[Russ Allbery]

Vladimir Vassilev <address@hidden> writes:

> Can you point me to similar open source projects. I am mostly curious
> what solution they chose for distributing the driver binaries after they
> have been built. In the case of userspace programs and libraries the
> autotools primitives (PROGRAMS, LTLIBRARIES) take care of all the rules
> (install uninstall dist distcheck etc.). Perhaps there could be some
> good ideas on how to distribute drivers.

I would actually not even attempt this, or at most copy the module into
/lib/modules/<version-of-kernel>/extra and tell the user they may need to
run depmod.  The correct way of installing modules and integrating them
with the kernel packages on the system is *extremely*
distribution-specific and will require a unique solution on each Linux
distribution to really get satisfactory integration with the rest of the
operating system.

For example, on Debian, you really want to be able to generate Debian
packages containing the kernel modules so that installing and removing
those packages will run depmod as appropriate and so that dependencies
will link them to the appropriate Linux kernel (and also so that you can
easily rebuild only the kernel module whenever the kernel API changes,
which is about twice a month).

This area is something of a mess and there really isn't much
cross-distribution agreement on how to do it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>