[arch-dev-public] Virtualbox binary modules maintainer

[Sébastien Luttringer]

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/virtualbox-modules

-- 
Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer
https://seblu.net | Twitter: @seblu42
GPG: 0x2072D77A

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