On 16/07/2014 19:39, Dave Reisner wrote:

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 07:26:16PM +0200, Sébastien Luttringer wrote: I guess this is/was you?

It was Bartłomiej.

I'm not interested, but this is pretty vague. How much time is involved? How often? Are there open bugs? Have you worked with upstream at all? Do they suck?

From upstream tarball, I create virtualbox-host-dkms and virtualbox-guest-dkms (split packages from virtualbox pkgbase). This is the "official" way of building vbox* kernel modules. All "real" modules bugs are handled in the virtualbox package.

To provide pre-compiled version of these modules for our linux and linux-lts packages, we have virtualbox-modules and virtualbox-modules-lts. Each one generate 2 packages, one for modules required in the hypervisor and one for modules required in the vm.

Note: We don't provides pre-compiled modules for linux-grsec.

AFIR, rebuild of these packages occur when: - New release of virtualbox (I handle them) - New release of the attached kernel package - Someone open a BR because a rebuild was not done when the kernel was updated.

There is currently one open bug report, which will be fixed when I will push the last release of vbox tonight.

You can have an idea of the time needed looking at the package history[1].

DKMS is pretty lousy without hook functionality in the package manager. The whole point is that you can trigger this seamlessly on install/upgrade.

I'm not sure the package manager is an issue here, what we want is build vbox modules for the running kernel.

If you enable dkms service, the modules you need for kernel you are running will be built and loaded during the boot. It's transparent.

The problem is more around our way of dealing with kernel updates (removing running kernel headers) than pacman packages ordering. We already don't support the case when user upgrade the kernel and don't reboot (kernel vs modules mismatch) immediately.

There *will* be bug reports if you just drop these packages.

Could you be more specific?

I have the feeling that using dkms packages will prevent bug reports coverings depmod or packages was not rebuilt for the current kernel.

This also simplify management for non official kernels.

Cheers,

[1] https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/log/trunk?h=packages/v...

On 16/07/2014 22:13, Dave Reisner wrote:

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 09:05:50PM +0200, Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

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On 16/07/2014 19:39, Dave Reisner wrote:

...

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 07:26:16PM +0200, Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

Building modules on boot is doing it too late. It's on the same plane as what our initscripts used to do -- call 'depmod -A' on bootup. It's too late, and you're asking for a race condition.

I am embarrassed I don't see why it's too late. I'm doing this for 3 years, maybe I'm a lucky idiot. We also have users who use vbox-dkms package doing this without any bug report about a race condition.

What about dkms-based modules which you're trying to build into the initramfs?

There is few reason to embed vbox modules inside the initramfs, but anyway, I guess it's up to the initramfs software you use to trigger the build of dkms managed modules (for the requested kernel) it wants to ship.

We can have an mkinitcpio hook which build all the dkms modules for the targeted kernel.

However, the pacman ordering issue is back, until next release of pacman... which is, fortunately, expected in august.

Calling this early enough that it tries to avoid some of the races will just mean that you're unnecessarily blocking boot for X minutes while you build modules. Unless I'm missing something, that's a lousy user experience.

The build can continue far after your KDE desktop environment has started. If you run virtualbox GUI before the build finish you will get the message that modules are missing. I think our user are able to deal with that.

Please, if you really want this to be some defacto standard for how we handle third-party modules, we *really* need someone dedicated to adding hook support in pacman.

I'm only suggesting this for virtualbox modules, but, you are right, we can simplify our way of managing all external modules by using dkms.

I know there are pros and cons to this solution, that's a team decision, not mine. I see this as a better simple stupid solution with our currrent tools.

...

...

There *will* be bug reports if you just drop these packages.

Could you be more specific?

If you're touting DKMS as the new hotness, you will absolutely need to have replaces/conflicts on the DKMS package for the packages you want to obviate. Otherwise, these packages will remain installed and eventually conflict with a kernel update. Around that time, you'll see bug reports.

ok, you are talking of bug reports during the transition phase.

So, if we do that, we should handle the transition smartly. I think to replaces/conflits and advertise in .install. We can even put a global announce if you think it's necessary.

Don't believe that I'm in love with dkms. It's an helpful crap. I would prefer have a brand new Lennart systemd glue[1] or anything more elegant to manage out-of-tree modules. But it's currently the most spread solution.

Are you, as the virtualbox maintainer, not willing to accept this shared responsibility?

Remember the title of my mail. I didn't start by "Burn the vbox modules". I'm looking for someone who want to be maintainer of these packages to handle official kernels rebuild and deal with bug reports.

Of course, I would prefer to drop them, because I feel them unnecessary. They slow down the release process (of the kernel and virtualbox) and cause issues.

Cheers,

[1] With depends (and wait) on modules instead of using systemd-modules-load.