LinuxCzar

Engineering Software, Linux, and Observability. The website of Jack Neely.    

Fedora Kmod

  March 1, 2009

Superceeded

This project has been superceeded by several iterations and variations on this packaging theme that do not rely on a Yum plugin.

Fedora Kmod Project

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I worked with the Fedora folks to develope a RPM packaging standard for distributing third party kernel modules.  This page is the upstream source for the Yum plugin “fedorakmod” that handles RPM packages built to this standard.  This standard is documented by RPMFusion.

You can have many kernels installed and each kernel can have its own Foobar module.  This plugin figures out which kernel a new Foobar kernel module applies to and can install/upgrade that kernel’s module without affecting other kernels or packages.  This is in contrast to not being able to upgrade kernel modules without a new kernel or having RPM remove the many Foobar kernel module packages as it upgrades one specific Foobar package.  The Fedorakmod plugin can also remove new kernels from the transaction if the running kernel modules are not available for the new kernel.  This prevents machines from rebooting into a kernel without all the needed modules.

The yum-fedorakmod package was removed during Fedora 11 development as were all other kernel module helpers.

To Do

  • Add support for Kmod v2
  • Repackage for Fedora

Git Repository

License

Fedora Kmod is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, or at your option, any higher version.