I think the truth here is that Fedora packagers don't much care about out of tree kernel modules. It's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about or discussing. I wonder what's stopping this kernel module from going upstream? That's the best way to resolve this. He mentions in the other blog posting that it's an out of tree patch required to read motherboard sensors, which doesn't sound to me like anything controversial.<p>However this does seem like it's a bug so maybe Chris would be better off filing a Bugzilla rather than ranting. He says:<p>> <i>I would file a bug report but I cannot imagine that Fedora would accept it. They already know that this feature doesn't work</i><p>which may or may not be true ("Fedora" is not a monolithic entity, but a group of packagers with many different opinions). I think he should file the bug anyway, and at the same time work with the upstream kernel community to get the sensors patch into the mainline.
You really had me here right up until:<p>> I would file a bug report but I cannot imagine that Fedora would accept it.<p>Weak modules was shipped with Fedora to allow some testing for certain scenarios as things go forward. There was already a bug filed that it took too long to run on major kernel updates, so the call to the script was removed from the kernel post. Had someone filed a bug on this, it would have been looked at as well, and likely your module would just work instead of wasting time to write a blog post about how something is broken that you can't even be bother to file a bug over.<p>- The Fedora Kernel Maintainer who actually reads every bug filed against the Fedora kernel
If I’m understanding this correctly, this is actually a feature that was developed for RHEL and just happens to be enabled on Fedora by accident.<p>RHEL has a stable kernel ABI because they support third-party binary modules such as from SGI.<p>Since the kernel ABI is stable, there is no need to rebuild DKMS modules on every kernel update.<p>FWIW, Debian has a similar mechanism which uses stable kernel ABIs. That’s why a Debian kernel image has always two version numbers, one for the ABI and one for the actual kernel version.<p>DKMS modules on Debian are rebuilt only when the ABI version changes. It probably uses the same DKMS feature as RHEL, not sure.