Static build of kmod

Greetings,

since commit b7016153ec87dba2b0f0d182cc8f1e3b12f4dfaf building static kmod is disabled. I would like to question that decision.

My use case is as follows: I build a custom BSP and would like to provide statically linked host tools. That makes it easy to deploy them at any location, and that these tools do not pick up random shared libraries of the underlying Linux system when executed. Currently kmod is one of the few packages that are not able to build in that way.

I understand that you may want to prevent other tools (e.g. sytemd was mentioned in that commit) to link against a static libkmod, and that is fine with me. What I would like to get is static kmod tools. For the BSP host tools case I don't mind if a libkmod does not exist at all, only the tools are of interest.

What do you think?

Regards,

Eike
--
Rolf Eike Beer, emlix GmbH, http://www.emlix.com
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emlix - smart embedded open source

Quoted 11 lines

Greetings,

since commit b7016153ec87dba2b0f0d182cc8f1e3b12f4dfaf building static kmod is disabled. I would like to question that decision.

My use case is as follows: I build a custom BSP and would like to provide statically linked host tools. That makes it easy to deploy them at any location, and that these tools do not pick up random shared libraries of the underlying Linux system when executed. Currently kmod is one of the few packages that are not able to build in that way.

Quoted 7 lines

I understand that you may want to prevent other tools (e.g. sytemd was mentioned in that commit) to link against a static libkmod, and that is fine with me. What I would like to get is static kmod tools. For the BSP host tools case I don't mind if a libkmod does not exist at all, only the tools are of interest.

What do you think?

It's a build system limitation:

./configure -h| grep static
--enable-static[=PKGS] build static libraries [default=no]

The --enable-static switch is about building static libraries, and as a consequence linking the binaries statically.
We don't want libkmod to be built statically because its symbols will conflict with other libraries
as you mentioned.

If we had a --enable-static-tools switch that made only the tools static (default false), I think it would be acceptable.

And since you are going to mess with the build system, if you want to convert kmod to meson it would be very
appreciated :)