Missing API for handling 3rd party kernel modules

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In our company we found very frustrating that there is no "official" API how to handle 3rd party kernel modules inside RHEL.

 

It is especially painful for large environments where kernel updates are needed on many servers. It is probably possible to handle 3rd party kernel stuff on 10-20 servers but for large RHEL deployments it is a lot of overhead and (sometimes) many unsuccessful trials. We would like to use pure RedHat kernels without 3rd party drivers, unfortunatelly newer hardware sometimes requires hardware vendor-provided drivers, some low-level software too.

 

Yes, we can use dkms (packaged from Fedora or EPEL), but it is not officially supported and thus each vendor has own specific ways how to trigger kernel updates etc.

 

Ksplice seems to be very promising tool but it was acquired by Oracle, so I doubt it will be actively supported by Red Hat.

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