Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: NET: Questions about supporting older kernel's with kmods | From | Ben Hutchings <> | Date | Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:53:13 +0000 |
| |
On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 09:21 -0500, Gregory Haskins wrote: > Hi All, > > So I was in the process of packaging up my venet driver so that it could > not only support the in-tree build (in -next), but also build as a KMP > for inclusion in existing distros that already shipped (like SLE, RHEL, > CentOS, etc). > > The problem I ran into is that the ethtool and netdev_ops components of > the in-tree version do not necessarily align with the substrate > capabilities of older kernels. What are the best-practices surrounding > this issue? > > Q1) Is there any official CONFIG tags (e.g. HAVE_NETDEV_OPS) I can key > off of,
These feature test macros are not consistently provided.
> or should I simply look at the kernel version?
That works up to a point, but the 'enterprise' distros backport a lot to earlier kernel versions which can make version tests invalid.
Some out-of-tree/backported drivers use autoconf-style tests, but there is no standard way of doing this.
[...] > Q2) Is it considered "bad form" to include such compile-time directives > in the version of the code going upstream? [...]
Yes. Don't do that.
Ben.
-- Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare Communications Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job. They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.
-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |