Fedora has significantly fumbled DKMS handling for Linux kernel modules

Re:Fedora has significantly fumbled DKMS handling for Linux ... by rwmj on Monday May 24, 2021 @03:49AM (#27261959)

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.

However this does seem like it's a bug so maybe Chris would be better off filing a Bugzilla rather than ranting. He says:

> I would file a bug report but I cannot imagine that Fedora would accept it. They already know that this feature doesn't work

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.

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Re:Fedora has significantly fumbled DKMS handling for Linux ... by Sjonny on Monday May 24, 2021 @04:26AM (#27262144)

It's about this module: https://github.com/a1wong/it87

There is an old version of it in the kernel, which doesn't support newer released versions of that chip. I remember reading somewhere that the maintainer was being swamped with requests to make support for those chips too, but didn't get any help for it and it became a toxic environment to work on. So he dropped it.

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Re:Fedora has significantly fumbled DKMS handling for Linux ... by jforbes_fedora on Monday May 24, 2021 @08:22AM (#27263505)

>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

This is not entirely true. There is not much we can do about out of tree modules when they don't work with the latest kernel version for whatever reason. If the issue is in our packaging, I do try to keep things working. For instance, we added a number of deps to kernel-devel for 5.12 because what was there was not adequate for 'make prepare' to run, which was required for some modules.

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