[Yum] Dynamic yum respositories?

Fajar A. Nugraha fajar at fajar.net
Wed Apr 25 02:13:52 UTC 2007


Ram Pai wrote:
> Hi,
>
>     I have this unique problem. I am planning on providing through yum
> repositories, driver rpms for different versions of the distro kernel.
> As and when new kernel is available and installed by the user, the
> corresponding rpm for the driver is automatically made available in the
> repositories. 
Although Michael's response to pass kernel version to yum is
interesting, I believe the aproach you're looking for requires that the
particular kernel version (or to be accurate, the kernel-devel package
incase of RHEL) is also installed on the yum server.
Plus, some srpms only builds driver for the current running kernel by
default, so you might need to tweak that as well.

Have you take a look at dkms, also another DELL project, instead?
http://linux.dell.com/projects.shtml

dkms will allow clients to build drivers for new kernels dynamically,
since when the new kernel boots dkms_autoinstaller will create the
appropriate driver for it. Converting an srpm to dkms rpm is actually
quite easy. I've managed to create dkms rpms for qlogic HBA driver
(v8.01.07) and RHEL5's gfs (v0.1.16) the same day I found out about dkms.

This should solve most driver problems. For qlogic HBA (or any scsi
driver, I think), you need to reboot twice, as it will also update
initrd which will only be used on the next reboot.

Regards,

Fajar



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