Hi Stephen.
Thanks for responding. Can I trust the module symlinks that are generated when new RHEL6
kernels are installed? I can deal with too-aggressive symbol checking that breaks
compatibility between releases but my fear is that symlinks get generated for modules that
are not compatible.
-------
Yemi
On Nov 20, 2014, at 1:31 AM, Stephen Champion <schamp(a)sgi.com> wrote:
The weak-updates bits added to the spec some time ago partially work,
but the post install and uninstall scripts are incomplete.
If you are interested in this feature, you might want look at LU-5614. I explored
getting this feature into mainline client builds properly : using the
%kernel_module_package macro to pick up vendor defined install scripts, instead of trying
to maintain the scripts in the spec.
The essential problem for %kernel_module_package is that the implementations can be
confused by multiple versions of the kernel being installed in the build environment.
With SGI's build environment, I was guaranteed to only have the enumerated flavors of
a single kernel release in my build environment. I do not have control over this in other
environments, and I have verified that Intel's jenkins environment has multiple kernel
releases installed. The mechanisms for overcoming this - specifying the kernel released
to build for - are not standardized among the distributions.
The spec changes are intrusive enough that we probably want to break off another spec for
use when a weak-modules build is requested by configure.
It's an annoying problem, but not an especially difficult one. I have been thinking
that dkms may actually be a better solution for my customers, so I've been looking in
that direction when I do have time to consider this problem.
As for kabi compatibility : I did find compatibility problems with the RHEL
2.6.32-YYY-stuff update releases not being compatible with previous 2.6.32-YYY releases.
Rare, but it did happen. From my experience, each YYY level is generally associated with
an RH dot level release. Compatibility is checked for all of the symbols in the list for
all of the kernels in a major release stream. They are much more aggressive about
breaking unlisted symbols between dot releases, but it occasionally happens within a
series of dot release updates. We submitted a symbol list to RH a couple of times, but
many symbols Lustre uses were not accepted, and for good reasons.
SuSE unwisely picked up all of the kabi symbols we submitted to them, so I would not
expect Lustre to have a problem with kABI compatibility within a SLES release.
Adesanya, Adeyemi wrote:
> Giving this email a bump for Andreas. We spoke at SC14 this afternoon.
>
> -------
> Yemi
>
> On Nov 12, 2014, at 7:24 PM, Adesanya, Adeyemi <yemi(a)slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> I just discovered what appears to be working weak-modules support for Lustre
2.5.1 client modules on RHEL6. I saw our lustre filesystem was mounted on a host running
2.6.32-431.29.2.el6.x86_64 kernel but with client modules compiled for
2.6.32_431.23.3.el6.x86_64. Sure enough, the symlinks are in place under
/lib/modules/<kernel-version>. I tried booting into a couple of other kernel
versions with module symlinks and the lustre client worked there too. This is a pretty
significant feature......when was it introduced? Is it supported?
>>
>> --------
>> Yemi
>>
>> On Sep 15, 2011, at 4:22 PM, Adeyemi Adesanya wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Brian.
>>>
>>> I don't even see compatibility between "-274" kernels. I built
and installed on 2.6.18-274.3.1.el5 but the only module that got symlinked under
2.6.18-274.el5 was libcfs.ko.
>>> Thanks for the info regarding RedHat and kABI.
>>>
>>> ------
>>> Yemi
>>>
>>> On Sep 15, 2011, at 4:12 PM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 11-09-15 06:57 PM, Adesanya, Adeyemi wrote:
>>>>> I just dug up a message from lustre-discuss last year regarding
support for weak-modules. It would be great I didn't have to rebuild the
lustre-modules client RPM (lustre 1.8.6) against every new RHEL5 kernel that gets
released.
>>>> Indeed, it would be good. You don't have this problem for SLES
kernels,
>>>> FWIW. But for RH kernels, weak (Lustre at least) modules are not
>>>> possible due to RedHat only supporting a subset of the kABI for weak
>>>> modules and Lustre utilizes symbols outside of that subset (they call
>>>> the "whitelist").
>>>>
>>>> I tried to get the whitelist updated for Lustre quite a while ago but
>>>> was met with silence.
>>>>
>>>>> weak-modules reported that nearly all of the modules were
incompatible with other kernels including the recent 2.6.18-274.el5, 2.6.18-238.19.1.el5,
etc.
>>>> I'm not positive but I don't think those two kernels are intended
to be
>>>> ABI compatible. My (rather old, so not great) understanding is that the
>>>> first component after the 2.6.18- identifies kernels that are supposed
>>>> to be binary compatible and need to be the same between two kernels to
>>>> ensure kABI compatibility.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> b.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Brian J. Murrell
>>>> Senior Software Engineer
>>>> Whamcloud, Inc.
>>>>
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