Comment by bombcar
13 hours ago
It used to be relatively standard even on the "big" distros to compile your own kernel if you needed something outside of the bog-standard. Modularization and all the related auto-detect auto-mod tools have resulted in most distros shipping a "works for almost everyone" kernel that has everything available as a module.
Perhaps we should tend toward the first.
It seems like a reasonable middle ground for most distros is to put things in kernel modules, but then package those modules into separate packages. If you don't need somedriver.ko, then you don't `apt install linux-driver-somedriver`; if you do need it, just install the package and it just works without needing to compile anything and you get automatic updates and everything.
For Gentoo, of course, "just recompile the kernel as desired" is more reasonable, though they have binary packages including for the kernel and I don't see why the same idea shouldn't work there.
>but then package those modules into separate packages. If you don't need somedriver.ko, then you don't `apt install linux-driver-somedriver
But I don't want to know what drivers I need and will need next. Tomorrow I could buy a different wifi module and then what? Spend 3 hours googling which rtl378326973268632aahaxhabt.ko to install? Thanks but no thanks.
So why can't someone (probably the distro) build a utility that detects the hardware and installs the required kernal module?
We can have security and convenience.
3 replies →
On older versions of Windows you used to get popups saying new hardware is detected, would you like to install the driver now?
1 reply →
That's in generally available distro a huge PITA.
You can do blacklists easy enough if you want to, just add few lines of text into /etc.
I'd also like option for whitelisting, like whitelisting every single NIC driver is harmless enough coz they just won't be loaded, but anything that can be loaded by non-root userspace action should have option to be only loaded if it is on whitelist.
Tho all that is easily doable by just changing userspace AFAIK