Status of DRBD

[Ante Karamatić]

Hello

After discussing this topic during ubuntu-server team meeting, I've
decided to sent an email to all related parties with questions and
proposal of next steps.

>From packaging point of view, DRBD consists of two parts; kernel part
and userspace tools. Userspace tools heavily depend on kernel part and
it is required that those two would be of the same version.

At the moment, kernel part of the DRBD is being taking care of by Ubuntu
Kernel Team with occasional patches from Server Team. Server Team takes
care of user space tools. This arrangement introduces couple of problems:

1) backporting DRBD is impossible without introducing new kernel or
having two drbd modules in kernel
2) during development, we brake DRBD at least once (not a big deal, but
could be avoided)
3) maintaining DRBD requires keeping track of what's going on in kernel

I would like to bring kernel part of the whole package to Server Team.
That way Server Team would control whole package and would be able to
create backported packages for previous releases or utilize PPA.

This could be achieved with dkms. So, my question goes to Kernel Team:

Do you consider using dkms as a bad idea for this purpose? And do you
have any suggestions or recommendations on how to solve this?

Thank you all