Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 kABI Policy
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
Issue
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 kABI stablelist is empty
- Does kABI extend between minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9?
Resolution
The kernel Application Binary Interface (ABI) is now unique to each minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
Red Hat maintains a stablelist throughout each minor release. The 3rd party kernel modules that are dependent only on the symbols in the stablelist will continue to load successfully throughout that particular minor release without recompilation. Note: Red Hat reserves the right to change the stablelist symbols to address and resolve a CVE.
Stability of a symbol in a previous minor release does not imply stability in an upcoming release. To get symbols accepted onto the stablelist it is necessary to recompile kernel modules against the latest CentOS Stream kernel, provide ksc reports before the deadline and participate in symbol review for each minor release.
Root Cause
As the number of kernel modules that would exclusively use symbols from the kABI stablelist is very small, it was decided that this policy change regarding the kABI stablelist from previous version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would have a limited impact. Previously, the kABI stablelist was valid across all minor releases.
Diagnostic Steps
Check the contents of the kABI stablelist:
# cat /lib/modules/kabi-rhel90/kabi_stablelist_x86_64
[rhel9_x86_64_stablelist]
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