missing kernel modules (compared to standard devuan kernel)

[schmorp]

Would it be possible to provide the same modules as a "standard" debian kernel? For example, there doesn't seem to be a good reason why zswap is missing, and missing modules come up here and there. Providing the same modules as normal kernel might be a cool feature.

[MerlijnWajer]

Not sure how I (or others) missed this message before, apologies!

We could change our kernel defconfig to include a lot more modules, although it cannot be identical to the Debian kernel config: some things need to be built in or are otherwise not enabled in Debian.

There are a few things to consider:

1. Rebuild times, we currently rebuild the kernel often, and building all modules will easily slow down the kernel build 10x or more (just an estimation)
2. Disk space, some devices have not more than 10GB of free space, some even less, and our image is currently specced for 4GB microsd cards. If we would ship all the kernel modules, they can easily start taking up quite some space.

I do agree that it's a shame that we don't have more standard modules includes, so perhaps there is some middle ground we can find.

We could perhaps create a kernel package that contains all (or: most) modules, but is not used/installed by default (we can then also decide to rebuild it less frequently)?

[IMbackK]

rebuilding the kernel but not its modules is not going to work. enabling some modules sometimes also enables stuff that ends up in the kernel itself so some care must be taken to not burst the n900s size limit, but this probubly isent a huge concern. Honestly im not really concerned with kernel build times, during development i just build my own kernel via omap2plus_defconfig anyhow so if we had a omapMaemo_defconfig or whatever that gets build with the package on ci, this would not bother me at all really

[sicelo]

some care must be taken to not burst the n900s size limit

what is the size limit?

[rafael2k]

In the kernel for the PP we already have most of the drivers compiled as modules. Anything missing, please let me know.

[MerlijnWajer]

@rafael2k - I think we really want is a shared approach for all devices, not to file issues per each device

[MerlijnWajer]

rebuilding the kernel but not its modules is not going to work. enabling some modules sometimes also enables stuff that ends up in the kernel itself so some care must be taken to not burst the n900s size limit, but this probubly isent a huge concern. Honestly im not really concerned with kernel build times, during development i just build my own kernel via omap2plus_defconfig anyhow so if we had a omapMaemo_defconfig or whatever that gets build with the package on ci, this would not bother me at all really

Right, I never suggested that we rebuild only parts. I meant that we could have two packages:

• droid4-linux
• droid4-linux-full

Which produce the right linux-image-etc(-full) pkgs and could not be installed at the same time, because one is our current more minimal kernel, and the other ones is the big kernel with most modules enabled.