On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 8:08 PM, zxq9 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 05/25/2012 11:56 AM, Phong X Nguyen wrote:

>> Can you use DKMS to automate driver building on kernel update?
>
> I haven't messed with it myself, but it certainly should work fine if you
> just want to keep the same version of Catalyst around.
>
> Since the AMD driver release updates nearly as often as the Kernel itself,
> I've been building new fglrx rpms with the latest driver against each new
> kernel as they come out and keeping them in our repo. Some of the driver
> updates bring significant performance imrovements that actually matter to
> us, so we try not to miss any.

Very true. Both the ATI driver and the kernel get updated fairly
frequently (about once a month).

> I haven't found a way to completely automate away keeping track of the new
> AMD releases yet, though, so keeping fglrx rpms up to date is a lot like
> packaging a high-frequency project for a distro (as in, treating AMD
> Catalyst essentially the same way you would an upstream project).
>
> Anyway, DKMS is simple enough to set up that feeding it new Catalyst
> releases as they come out shouldn't be too difficult. (Well, from my
> understanding anyway. Again, I haven't done this myself yet, though I might
> give it a shot if I can get some time to play with it -- though even if any
> part of it is difficult the situation should be routine enough that wrapping
> any needed re-configuration process in a script should be trivial.)

The kernel module HowTo article has a section for DKMS :

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BuildingKernelModules

I have not tried it myself since I originally wrote it (because kmods
became my primary method of module building) but I believe it still
works.

Akemi