Akmods

Quick Overview

RPM Fusion/Livna distributes kernel-modules as kmod packages that contain modules precompiled for the latest kernels released by Fedora. That works fine for most people, but it doesn't work on systems with use different kernel -- like a self-compiled kernel, a older Fedora kernel or kernels from updates-testing/rawhide. The kmods-srpms can easily be rebuild for those kernels using rpmbuild with a kmod-specific parameter that defines what kernel to build the kmods for. But hat requires some knowledge how to build rpms; this is what the script akmods tries to make easier, as it does all the steps required to build a kmod.rpm from a kmod-srpm.

But the user still need to do something manually when he needs a kmod for a newly installed kernel. This is what akmodsd trying to fix: it's a script normally started from init on bootup that looks if all kmods are present. If a kmod is not found then akmods tries to rebuilds kmod.srpms found in a certain place in the filesystem; if that works it will install the rebuilding kmods automatically.

This is similar to dkms, but has one important benefit: one only needs a maintain a single kmod spec file which can be used both in the repos buildsystem and on the clients systems if needed.