building hostap rpm

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 08:08, alf romeo wrote:
> hi there!
> 
> I was able to build a hostap-0.0.4-1.i386.rpm.I also
> have tested it on PCs having the same specs as the one
> i built the driver against.My question is, do i have
> to build separate rpms for an athlon,i586 or i686
> architecure?Is it possible to have only one rpm
> version that can run on different architecture.I am a
> beginner to rpm building. 
Normally speaking, programs that are built for an i386 should run on
386s and above (i.e. everything). i486 stuff runs on 486s and above,
i586 Pentiums and above etc.

However since you are building kernel modules the module must match the
exact version of the kernel it is inserted to (and RedHat distribute
several different versions of each kernel they release...). The user may
be running an i386 kernel an i586 kernel a bigmem kernel etc. Thus if
you want to satisfy every possible redhat user you would have to build
against all those different kernels (which means you have to compile
each of those kernels too...). This all gets quite painful quite
quickly. It is also the case that modules should be rebuilt if the
kernel is updated (which you should do when security holes are found) so
you have to go through the whole recompilation again...

If you really are determined to help all possible users you will
probably want to take a look at RedHat's Device Driver Kit -
http://people.redhat.com/dledford/ but if you are starting out I'd just
build against whatever kernel you have and provide an SRPM for anyone
else to compile against their kernel.

-- 
Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/