I just stumbled over some good documentation on the usage of devlabel in Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 System Administrators Guide. I've gotten some emails of people looking for this specific type of thing, so hopefully this will fill that need.

Interestingly, at work on Friday, a co-worker and I discovered that when you plugged a usb key into his old desktop system with a funky cd-rom drive, devlabel's algorithm to find the device's uuid was causing the cdrom to eject the cdrom drive every 30 seconds. Our conjecture was that scanning for the devices uuid was, for some internal design reason of the cdrom, causing a bus reset which led to the eject action. Happily with the latest devlabel which implements an internal ignore list to avoid such bad devices, the problem went away. Unfortunately, the older devlabel is on the RHEL 3 gold cds.

By Gary at 01:29 PM in Linux | Comments (0)  

DKMS version 0.99.01 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Bumped the version to 0.99 to convey impending 1.00 release status. The intention is to iron out any remaining issues and move out of beta phase in the coming weeks.

* Added MODULES_CONF_OBSOLETE_ONLY[#] directive array available in dkms.conf. This array, when set to "yes", informs DKMS to only modify /etc/modules.conf if it finds an obsolete reference within it as specified in the MODULES_CONF_OBSOLETES[#] array.

* Changed DKMS so it will now only bother to remove /etc/modules.conf entries during an uninstall if REMAKE_INITRD is set, or if you are uninstalling your module from the last kernel that it is installed on.

* Fixed mktarball so that the file that it creates cannot have a filename >255 chars

* Updated the man page

By Gary at 03:11 PM in Linux | Comments (1)  

DKMS 0.46.04 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* DKMS mktarball --binaries-only now includes a copy of the dkms.conf within the tarball such that ldtarball can load a binaries only tarball if you specify --force. This is still a bad idea, however, since if you load a binaries-only tarball into your DKMS tree without the module source already added to your tree, you won't be able to build the module using DKMS.

* dkms_autoinstaller now installs to /etc/init.d instead of /etc/rc.d/init.d for cross-distro happiness.

By Gary at 02:52 PM in Linux | Comments (0)  

Brad Edwards at ESPN is projecting that Ohio State will overtake USC in the BCS rankings even though Southern Cal didn't lose this weekend. Well, the Buckeyes are the defending national champions.

Did I mention the Bengals are in first place.

By Gary at 10:38 PM in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)  

DKMS 0.45.01 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Changed the logic behind when modules.conf gets edited during a remove. Previously, after a remove would complete, DKMS would automatically re-add references into modules.conf for that module regardless of whether the module which was just removed was active on that kernel or not. Now, DKMS only adds the references back into modules.conf if that module was active for that kernel and, if and only if, there is at least one other kernel which still has that module installed on it.

* Added hugemem kernel prep support for RH hugemem kernels.

By Gary at 02:08 PM in Linux | Comments (4)  

DKMS 0.44.05 is now available (tarball or RPM):

* Changed $MODULES_CONF_ALIAS_TYPE to an array that is a part of the $BUILT_MODULE_NAME[#] / $DEST_MODULE_NAME[#] array family. This allows you to specify different alias types for different modules within a single DKMS package. $MODULES_CONF_OBSOLETES[#] (explained below) is also part of this directive array family.

* Added DKMS directive array $MODULES_CONF_OBSOLETES[#]. This directive should be used to specify the modules that your newer module makes obsolete. During install, DKMS will look for entries for these modules in /etc/modules.conf if the corresponding $MODULES_CONF_ALIAS_TYPE[#] entry is set and will remove these. As you uninstall modules, DKMS will first try to put an original module back into the kernel. If it does this, it will leave the reference to the non-obsolete module in modules.conf. If no original_module exists in the kernel, but an obsolete module does, DKMS will put the obsolete module reference back into modules.conf and remake the initrd. If neither exist, it will just remove the non-obsolete reference and replace it with nothing.

* As well, the $MODULES_CONF_OBSOLETES directive can be used to specify multiple modules which are made obsolete. This should be done by setting the variable to a comma-delimited list (eg. ="megaraid,megaraid_2002"). During uninstall, if no original module is found, DKMS attempts to instead use an obsolete module giving priority to the leftmost entry in the variable.

* Updated the man page to better explain how DKMS handles modules.conf changes.

By Gary at 03:18 PM in Linux | Comments (0)