[RFC] Get OOT modules working with vanilla kernels

[Andy Whitcroft]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:15:32PM +0000, Eric Appleman wrote:
> I still don't understand the technical reasons why OOT modules will cause
> panics, but I am of the opinion that the value of your unsupported kernels would
> triple if they could handle such modules.
> 
> Building git kernels in the Debian style is a pain and nobody else bothers to
> compile rc and daily kernels en masse like you guys do.

In order to be useful with out of tree modules they need to be built
with the matching compiler.  If they are not then things tend to get
layed out differently and generally fail in unexpected ways (vbox is a
good example).  Some out of tree modules even enforce this.

The purpose of these kernels is to allow testing on a wide range of our
releases for comparitive testing between mainline and our delta and so
they get built in the oldest release on which it is reasonable to try
and use them.  For us that means the previous LTS release.

Basically to make these useful with OOT driver in this manner we would
need to build them on each release we might test them on, which is a big
build and space burner.  They would also need rebuilding if the compiler
changed in the release (though this is hopefully rare).

-apw