Some elrepo kmod packages will no longer be available for RHEL 8.10 and 9.4

Red Hat are due to release RHEL point release updates 8.10 and 9.4 shortly.

Red Hat have made changes to the way they handle device drivers that are deprecated, disabled and unmaintained.

* Considerations in adopting RHEL 8: Chapter 11. Hardware enablement

* Considerations in adopting RHEL 9: Chapter 13. Hardware enablement

The way that Red Hat have implemented these changes in the 8.10 and 9.4 releases means that the ELRepo Project will no longer be able to re-enable device IDs in our kmod packages for devices that have been disabled in the RHEL kernel.

Affected kmod packages are:

kmod-aacraid
kmod-megaraid_sas
kmod-mlx4
kmod-mpt3sas
kmod-qla2xxx

* ELRepo bug tracker #1440 (EL-8)
* ELRepo bug tracker #1439 (EL-9)

What are my options?

If you are using an affected device on RHEL or compatible, there are a couple of options.

1. AlmaLinux have reverted these changes in their Enterprise Linux kernel so should be unaffected and support for these devices should be enabled by default.

2. Use an alternative kernel with native support enabled for your older hardware device. The ELRepo Project provides kernel-lt and kernel-ml packages which should natively support these older hardware devices. Other distributions may also ship their own kernel offerings.

Thank you,

The ELRepo Team

Note added on 2024-05-01: It was pointed out to us that the changes made in RHEL 9.4 would only apply to in-kernel modules. Therefore external kernel modules provided by kmods are not affected.

In Loving Memory of Alan Bartlett

 Alan Bartlett died unexpectedly of natural causes on May 31st, 2023.

 It is with deep sorrow and profound sadness that we mourn the loss of Alan Bartlett, a brilliant computer expert, visionary, and the esteemed founder of the ELRepo Project [1]. He is also well known as 'burakkucat'. Alan passed away on May 31st, 2023, leaving a void in the world of Enterprise Linux that will be profoundly felt by all who benefited from his vast knowledge and contributions.

Alan's innate curiosity and talent for computer programming became evident from an early age. He dedicated himself wholeheartedly to his work, pouring his energy into his passion for computer programming and the advancement of open-source software. Early on, Alan was a Unix user and later moved to Linux, along with many fellow enthusiasts, where his kernel presence became felt in the RHEL / CentOS 4 community. Alan, with three other individuals, founded the ELRepo Project for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives [2].

Alan's unwavering commitment and tireless efforts propelled the ELRepo Project to new heights, delivering kernel packages from kernel.org to countless users and organizations worldwide [3].

Beyond his technical brilliance, Alan possessed a warm and generous spirit. He was always willing to lend a helping hand, providing guidance and support to fellow community members. Alan's kindness, patience, and willingness to share his knowledge endeared him to all who had the privilege of knowing him. He will be remembered not only for his technical expertise but also for his compassionate nature and genuine desire to make a positive difference in the lives of others.

Alan Bartlett's untimely departure leaves an indelible void in our hearts and in the world of technology. His passion, intellect, and unwavering dedication to his craft will forever be cherished and remembered. May his soul find eternal peace, and may his profound contributions to the field of open source communities continue to inspire and guide us in our pursuit of excellence.

Respectfully,

The ELRepo Team.

[1] https://elrepo.org/
[2] https://blog.toracat.org/2009/06/
[3] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2010-November/000382.html

ELRepo access stats: distributions

 We have not done any statistics for a long time. Here's some recent data on the access to our mirrorlist files, comparing unique IPs across major distributions. 

[EDIT on 2022-03-02] We have added "CentOS Stream" to the graph. While the kmod packages are not built for CentOS Stream kernels, our kernel-ml/lt packages should work there.

ELRepo and CentOS Stream

As many of you are aware, Red Hat have chosen to discontinue CentOS Linux 8 at the end of 2021 and have proposed CentOS Stream as its replacement in many environments [1]. We are still in the phase of trying to figure out what these changes mean for us and how they will impact ELRepo users. 

 ELRepo has always taken the stance that we support RHEL, and by extention that includes all RHEL compatible rebuilds such as CentOS and Scientific Linux. The kmod standard that ELRepo uses to package and deliver drivers for RHEL is totally dependent on the stable kernel ABI (kABI) that RHEL affords [2]. Unfortunately for us, CentOS Stream, now being upstream of conventional RHEL releases, gets changes to the kernel which are scheduled for the next RHEL minor point release (their kernels diverge). These changes often break kABI compatibility and may cause ELRepo packages to no longer work. 

So what does this mean for ELRepo users in practice? Well, preliminary testing of the first kernel update to EL8.3 in CentOS Stream indicates that 13 out of 44 kmod packages tested were broken by the kernel update. It is simply not possible (for ELRepo) to deliver kmod packages against a constantly moving target such as the CentOS Stream kernel, and even if we could, these newly fixed packages would likely no longer be compatible with RHEL. We would be looking at a whole new repository or project for ELRepo-Stream and we do not have the resources to do that. 

Therefore, for now, ELRepo are unable to officially support CentOS Stream kernels. In reality your package may continue to work but if/when it breaks, we will not be able to officially support it. Hopefully CentOS will be able to offer a solution that allows ELRepo packages to continue to work on CentOS Stream. 

ELRepo also offers kernel-ml and kernel-lt packages for EL8 and these can be used on CentOS-Stream to provide a modern kernel (mainline or longterm) with native support for the legacy hardware Red Hat removed. These newer kernels may provide a convenient solution for some users whose hardware is not natively supported on CentOS Stream. 

[1] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/ 

[2] https://elrepo.org/wiki/doku.php?id=faq#what_is_a_kabi-tracking_kmod

RHEL6 is Now End of Life

RHEL6 reached end of life (EOL) on 30th November 2020.

As a consequence, the ELRepo Project has likewise ended support for el6. All el6 related packages (except for elrepo-release) have been removed from the repository.

RHEL6 customers on extended update support (EUS) wishing to continue to access our content may do so through the archives but this content will not be maintained nor supported.

The ELRepo team would like to thank all of our users for their support throughout the ten years of existence of RHEL6.

Going forwards, we continue to support both RHEL7 and RHEL8 until those products reach their scheduled end of life.

Any rebuild project(s) of the above Red Hat operating systems are also welcome to consume our products.

As always, we build our products on RHEL systems for users of RHEL systems.

A Brief Guide on How to Access the ELRepo Project Repositories

Welcome to ELRepo, an RPM repository for Enterprise Linux packages. ELRepo supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives (Scientific Linux, CentOS & others).

The ELRepo Project focuses on hardware related packages to enhance your experience with Enterprise Linux. This includes filesystem drivers, graphics drivers, network drivers, sound drivers, webcam and video drivers.

How to Get Started

Import the public key:

rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org

To Install ELRepo for RHEL-8 or CentOS-8:

yum install https://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-8.el8.elrepo.noarch.rpm

To Install ELRepo for RHEL-7, SL-7 or CentOS-7:

yum install https://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm

To make use of our mirror system, please also install yum-plugin-fastestmirror.

To Install ELRepo for RHEL-6, SL-6 or CentOS-6:

yum install https://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm

To make use of our mirror system, please also install yum-plugin-fastestmirror.

The Repository Contents

ELRepo contains four channels.

elrepo  This is the main channel and is enabled by default. As this channel should not contain packages also present in the distribution, it should be safe to run a 'yum update' with this repository channel enabled.

For example, to install kmod-r8168 (Realtek r8168 NIC driver):

yum install kmod-r8168

Depending on the package being installed or the repository setup, it might be necessary to disable non-elrepo repositories:

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=elrepo install kmod-nvidia

elrepo-extras  The elrepo-extras channel provides packages and their dependencies that replace/update RHEL distribution packages. It may be enabled in the /etc/yum.repos.d/elrepo.repo file or used with 'yum --enablerepo=elrepo-extras'.

elrepo-testing  The elrepo-testing channel provides packages yet to be released to the main channel and is disabled by default. It may be enabled in the /etc/yum.repos.d/elrepo.repo file or used with 'yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing'.

elrepo-kernel  The elrepo-kernel channel provides both the long-term support kernels (which have been configured for RHEL-7 and RHEL-6) and the latest stable mainline kernels (which have been configured for RHEL-8 and RHEL-7) using sources available from the Linux Kernel Archives. This channel may be enabled in the /etc/yum.repos.d/elrepo.repo file or used with 'yum --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel'.

RHEL 8.0 and support for removed adapters

In RHEL 8.0, support for a good number of hardware devices has been removed. A list of removed adapters with their device IDs can be found in this RHEL documentation. We provide support for some of those that are still fairly commonly used today. You can check your devices's IDs (as shown by lspci -nn) against our list of supported devices.

(1) Installation of the OS requires a driver for your hardware. We offer driver update disks (DUD). You can download them from here or the corresponding directory of our mirror sites. Each DUD image contains a driver in the form of a kmod package. The installer is supposed to find the driver. If this does not happen, you need to append the inst.dd option to the boot command line. For details please see Performing an assisted driver update. Also, a tutorial video that demonstrates how to use ELRepo's DUD is available.

(2) The installation process installs the kmod package for your adapter. Normally, because of the kABI-tracking nature of kmod, there is no need to reinstall the driver upon each new kernel update. However, it was found that the current version of dracut in RHEL 8.0 has a bug and the initramfs image of a new kernel does not contain the kernel module from the installed kmod package. As a result, the new kernel fails to boot. (This is no longer an issue. See the [Update] below.)

As an interim solution for the problem in (2), we provide a dracut package with a patch that fixes the bug here:

 http://elrepo.org/people/akemi/testing/el8/dracut/

Install this version of dracut and then update the kernel. The system now should boot normally.

[UPDATE]  dracut-049-10.git20190115.el8_0.1 released on Oct 29, 2019 has the patch that fixes the issue.

[UPDATE2]  When updating the OS from 8.0 to 8.1, ELRepo's kmod packages must be updated to their .el8_1 version for the system to boot the 8.1 kernel.

[Note for CentOS-8 users]  If you have switched to the centosplus kernel (kernel-plus) while on 8.0, you may want to uninstall the kmod package and no further action is required when updating to 8.1.

[Note for users who wish to install remotely] There is an excellent blog post written by Arrfab.

yum-plugin-elrepo

With almost every new RHEL point release, we hear from users that yum fails with errors. In most cases, this is because the kernel of their distribution has not been updated to the updated version in RHEL. Our yum-plugin-elrepo package takes care of this issue. The details are in our release announcement copied below

 =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
yum-plugin-elrepo-7.5.1-1.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm

yum-plugin-elrepo provides a yum plugin to exclude kmod packages from the yum transaction set which require kernels that are not yet available.

Elrepo.org provide kmod packages for RHEL and compatible distros. RHEL point releases sometimes break kABI compatibility requiring a rebuild of the kmod package against the latest RHEL kernel.

When this occurs at a RHEL point release, compatible distros such as CentOS and Scientific Linux often have yet to release their corresponding kernels which causes unresolved dependency errors in yum.

This plugin seeks to determine the kernel version that any given kmod package is built against and then determine if the corresponding kernel is available. If the corresponding kernel is not available, the kmod
package will be excluded from the yum transaction set until the required kernel becomes available.

Note: CentOS users will need to enable the CentOS Vault repositories to make previous kernels available to yum otherwise older kmod packages may be excluded.
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

ELRepo statistics 2017

Happy New Year!

It's been almost 8 years since we established The ELRepo Project. And 3 years since we last showed the statistics of our site.

As you can see below, the number of ELRepo users have continuously grown. We now have over 1 million users (1,146,783 IPs) using the repositories. EL5 will be EOL'd in 3 months. We would expect EL7 to catch and ultimately surpass EL6, although EL7's growth is not as fast as that of EL6's.

Our kernels, kernel-ml and kernel-lt, are popular. They are doubling every year the past 2 years. We have seen 187,785 users (IPs) in the last year, and ~18% of ELRepo's userbase have installed one duing the last 12 months.

Although not shown in the graphs, we see that the most popular download in all EL5, 6 and 7 was the Nvidia package which is followed by DRBD.

kABI-tracking kmod packages

Our kmod packages are "kABI-tracking". The drivers they provide will work across all Enterprise Linux (EL) kernel releases, meaning there is no need to reinstall them upon each kernel update. But what is the kABI?

The Kernel Application Binary Interface (kABI) is a set of in-kernel symbols used by drivers and other kernel modules. Each major and minor RHEL kernel release has a set of in-kernel symbols that are whitelisted. A kABI-tracking kmod package contains a kernel module that is compatible with a given kABI, that is, for a given major and minor release of the EL kernel.

However, in some cases the drivers use symbols that are not whitelisted in the RHEL kernel and these kernel symbols can change between releases. If a driver uses such kernel symbols, then the driver will not be backward compatible with older, previously released kernels.

How can we check if a kmod package uses non-whitelisted kABI symbols? In EL-6, EL-7, and EL8, install the following two packages:

yum install kernel-abi-whitelists ksc

Locate the module file (*.ko) and run the command:

ksc -k <module_name>.ko

For example:

$ ksc -k /lib/modules/2.6.32-358.el6.x86_64/extra/it87/it87.ko
Checking against architecture x86_64
Total symbol usage: 45 Total Non white list symbol usage: 4
Score: 91.11%

A copy of the report is saved in /home/bob/ksc-result.txt

In the above example, user "bob" has performed the check.

[Note] Due to a bug in the ksc package, it will not work for EL 6.7. More details and an easy fix can be found in Red Hat bug #1272348.

Kernel-lt and RHEL6

A recent posting [1] to our general mailing list [2] reminded us that the
linux-3.10.X branch of the kernel source code will soon be reaching end-of-life status upstream, at the Linux Kernel Archives website. [3]

As a consequence, we now have to decide which source code branch should be used to build our kernel-lt package set for RHEL6 (and its clones, CentOS 6 & Scientific Linux 6).

Remembering that our slogan is "For the community, by the community.", you are invited to take part in the discussion [4] to select the new linux source code branch that will be used to build our EL6 kernel-lt package set. That discussion has now begun on our development mailing list [5].

[1] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2015-September/002746.html
[2] http://lists.elrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/elrepo
[3] https://www.kernel.org/
[4] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo-devel/2015-September/000613.html
[5] http://lists.elrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/elrepo-devel

kernel-ml and Nvidia driver

As you know, ELRepo provides the Nvidia driver for EL kernels but not for kernel-ml or kernel-lt. People running kernel-ml/lt can install the driver by downloading it directly from the Nvidia site. However, kernel version 3.13, as currently offered by kernel-ml, is known to have a problem with the latest Nvidia drivers. Fortunately, there is a fix for this issue. The detailed instructions are posted by CentOS developer Johnny Hughes on his blog.

Thanks, Johnny!

Kernel-lt Package Sets -- What to Expect for EL5 and EL6

We have recently released [1] the latest update to the kernel-lt
package sets, for both EL5 and EL6.

Those of you who regularly monitor the front page of the Linux Kernel
Archives website [2] will have observed that the linux-3.0.X branch
has now been transitioned to EOL status following the release of the
linux-3.0.101 sources [3]. This action is in full accord with the
information contained within the 'Longterm release kernels' table, as
shown on the 'Active kernel releases' page [4].

As a preparation for this event, the ELRepo Project previously asked
for comments [5] as to which Linux source branch should then be used
for the basis of the kernel-lt package sets. The final decision [6]
was that kernel-lt for EL5 will be built using the linux-3.2.X branch
and kernel-lt for EL6 will be built using the linux-3.10.X branch.

All users who make regular use the kernel-lt packages should be
prepared for the transition that will thus occur with the next update
to the kernel-lt package sets.

[1] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2013-October/002014.html 

[2] https://www.kernel.org/

[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/22/125

[4] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

[5] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2013-August/001863.html

[6] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2013-August/001890.html

ELRepo Statistics (beginning to July 2013)

Kernel-lt and the Future.

The ELRepo Project has regularly released a kernel-lt (long term supported)
package set for both enterprise Linux 5 & 6. These kernels have been based
on the linux-3.0.X stable branch.

The linux-3.0.X stable branch will be reaching end of life this coming
October [1][2] and a decision will have to be made with regards to the
future of the kernel-lt package sets that we provide.

There are a number of options available, the most radical being to stop
building and providing such kernel-lt package sets. However no decision
has yet been made.

A thread has been started on the ELRepo users' mailing list [3] where
subscribers have been asked to assist the Project's administrators in
making a decision.

If you would like to be part of the decision making process, please
contribute to that mailing list thread.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html 
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Maintenance 
[3] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2013-August/001863.html