The return of modversions

Posted Feb 5, 2003 15:52 UTC (Wed) by mwilck (subscriber, #1966)
Parent article: The return of modversions

> Production kernels shipped by distributors need this feature, however;
> otherwise it is essentially impossible for vendors to supportbinary-only
> modules.

A RedHat-centric point of view. SuSE/UnitedLinux does not use modversions (I don't think they SuSE ever has).

Binary modules usually come with a wrapper that is available as source code and completely encapsulates the binary part. That is, from the modversioning point of view, there is no difference between a native kernel module and a "binary" module.

What makes binary modules incompatible between RedHat kernels is the kernel release compiled into the version string. Yes, it can be circumvented with insmod -f, but who would use that in a production system? Btw the release in the version string is a good thing; it is nice to know your kernel exactly just by an "uname -r". Always talking of production systems here.