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I work on Lustre development. Lustre uses a lot of kernel symbols not covered by the kABI stability guarantee and we already need to maintain configure checks for all of the other kernels (SuSe, Ubuntu, mainline, etc) that don't offer kABI anyway. So in my opinion, it's not worth the effort to adhere to kABI just for RHEL. Especially when RHEL derivatives might not offer the same guarantees. DKMS works well enough, especially for something open source like Lustre.

Honestly, I'm not sure who kABI is even designed for. All of the drivers I've interacted with the HPC space (NVIDIA, Lustre, vendor network drivers, etc.) don't seem to adhere to kABI. DKMS is far more standard. I'd be interested to know which vendors are making heavy use of it.




I believe kABI is becoming less and less valuable over time.

> Especially when RHEL derivatives might not offer the same guarantees.

They do not, as you likely have experienced.

> Honestly, I'm not sure who kABI is even designed for.

You make it work once, using the accepted kabi's and then not have to worry about updating your drivers (You likely know this).

Some customers and systems are very change adverse, almost any change is too much for them.




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