Arch Linux

matstc

Member

Registered: 2006-09-06

Posts: 10

kernel versions and rogue modules

Hello.
Can anyone tell me why the kernel-headers package and the kernel26 package never seem to carry the same version?
Right now in current, kernel-headers' version is 2.6.20.X while the kernel26 is at 2.6.21.

Also, why do I always have a directory in /lib/modules/  of the name of the next kernel version?  (in this case /lib/modules/2.6.21-ARCH while I'm at 2.6.20) .

I've had numerous problems around this over the last few months.  Today it happened again:  I just installed gspcav1 from the repository tree, which is a webcam module, and the module was installed for kernel 2.6.21 (in /lib/modules/2.6.21-ARCH/**/usbvideo/gspca.ko), which I'm not running yet. I really wish I didn't have to upgrade my kernel for this sort of things.

Can anyone help?

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: kernel versions and rogue modules

kernel-headers is used for user space, it doesn't matter at which version it is.
For building modules, you need to run the installed kernel.
So after updating the kernel, you should reboot as soon as possible to avoid this kind of problem.
Otherwise, don't update it, but this can get messy. You need to ignore kernel26 and the external modules you use, but there could be other parts of the system that require a recent kernel.

---

pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: kernel versions and rogue modules

External module packages are provided for the current kernel package only. If you choose to run an older kernel, any modules that you have already installed will continue to function as expected, but if you need to install new ones, as with gspcav1 above, you will need to either build it yourself or find the previous version of the package somewhere.

You have a /lib/modules/2.6.21-ARCH directory because that is where pacman installed gspcav1. There are no "rogue modules" here, simply an incorrect expectation of how module packages are handled.

matstc

Member

Registered: 2006-09-06

Posts: 10

Re: kernel versions and rogue modules

Thanks a lot shining and tomk.

I'm updating everything as I type this.