On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 9:22 AM Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 09:16:45AM +0100, Lucas Tanure wrote:
Hi,
Can I build a driver in the mainline kernel to a previous kernel version?
Not easily, and you really do not want to do that as the whole kernel source, drivers included, are a snapshot in time and depend on each other.
Like, in the mainline kernel, I have a Z driver, and I want to use that driver for my current stable driver in my embedded system with version kernel 5.15. Is there a procedure to build a kernel driver against other specific kernel headers?
Update to a newer kernel version, it will be much easier and simpler overall.
Drivers consume _everything_ from the core kernel, and are not stand-alone at all. They depend on everything else, trying to pick one out and put it into a different kernel is not how Linux works at all, sorry.
What prevents you from just using a newer kernel?
thanks,
greg k-h
It's not me or my team; it's every client for the company I work for that uses different kernel versions. And I am investigating how we can upstream our driver in the future and provide our driver to all customers having to support many different kernel versions. I think the only way is to have a few kernel branches with different kernel versions, but our driver is updated in those branches. Any better idea? Thanks! Lucas