On Wed, 2013-03-20 at 02:07 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> > [Re-sending to the correct list address.]
> >
> > On Sun, 2013-03-17 at 16:24 +0100, Camaleón wrote:
> >> El 2013-03-17 a las 14:58 +0000, Ben Hutchings escribió:
> >>
> >> > On Sun, 2013-03-17 at 15:46 +0100, Camaleón wrote:
> >>
> >> (...)
> >>
> >> > > Using Debian's stock network driver is not an option for me (full report
> >> > > available here²) so I have to try with the latests drivers but now that
> >> > > "compat-drivers" are compiled the generated modules cannot be loaded.
> >> > >
> >> > > Is there any by-pass for this?
> >> > >
> >> > > ¹http://marc.info/?t=136351034300002&r=1&w=2
> >> > > ²http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=664767
> >> >
> >> > Talk to the compat-drivers developers.
> >>
> >> To be sincere, I don't think that's a user's role.
> >>
> >> I don't know what's going on with these drivers but if they are not
> >> supported by Debian at all it would be better for all of us (plain
> >> users and developers) to simply say it so to avoid wasting time and
> >> resources.
> >
> > I would like to support them, in fact more than that I would like to
> > integrate them into official packages.  But there is no way we can
> > support an OOT module that defines symbols that we might need to add for
> > our own backports.  As it is 'compat' will ironically cause
> > incompatibility with Debian's own kernel upgrades.
> >
> > Compat developers: please add a prefix (not 'compat', that one's already
> > taken!)
> 
> We have been using compat_ for a while now to prefix a lot of our
> symbols without clashes for the 32-64 compat stuff, but sure -- we can
> use something else to help with any theoretical issues. Surprised
> Debian of all distributions would frankly have been affected given
> RHEL / SUSE didn't, but its OK, lets deal with it.

The conflict that just showed up in Debian involved the 'i2c_bit_algo'
symbol which had no symbol prefix in 'compat'.  We updated the in-tree
DRM drivers from 3.4.32 and started exporting the symbol from
i2c-algo-bit itself.

I hadn't noticed that you already used the 'compat_' prefix for some
exported symbols and I'm not aware of any current conflict with the
32-bit compatibility layer, but it seems plausible that it could happen
in future.

Ben.

> > to all the symbols exported by the 'compat' module.  Just
> > #define'ing the function/variable name before declaring them should
> > avoid the need for any changes to the drivers using it.
> 
> How about backport_ ? Patches coming up.
> 
>   Luis
> 

-- 
Ben Hutchings
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
                                                            - Robert Coveyou