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, an older Fedora kernel or the quickly changing kernels from updates-testing/rawhide. The kmods-srpms can easily be rebuilt for those kernels using rpmbuild with a kmod-specific parameter that defines what kernel to build the kmod for. But that requires some knowledge of how to build rpms; this is what the script akmods tries to make easier for the end user, as it does all the steps required to build a kmod.rpm for the running kernel from a kmod-srpm.

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

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