[gentoo-dev] Building against /usr/src/linux and linux-info.eclass

[Anthony G. Basile]

Hi everyone,

This issue has come up in a few bugs so I want to bounce it off the 
community.  When building packages that need a configured kernel source 
tree, many ebuilds inherit linux-info to find configuration info about 
the kernel.  However, there is the running kernel with its configuration 
(/proc/config.gz if it exists), there is the kernel source tree 
(/usr/src/linux if it exists and is configured) and both of these can be 
of a different version than linux-headers.  Since building modules 
consumes headers from /usr/include/linux, but uses code from 
/usr/src/linux and then these modules are expected to insmod against the 
running kernel, all of which can be mismatched, we have a lot of room 
for breakage.  Eg. bug #458014.

Any ideas about how to deal cleanly with situations like that?

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
[phone]