Should we sync FreeBSD-ports and FreeBSD-ports-kmods branches?

[ianthetechie]

I pkgbasified my system yesterday and then successfully did an upgrade to 15.1 following the upgrade instructions here: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/upgrading/. To save pain for others, do NOT look at the wiki or even the handbook as they are out of date and miss a key step: you have to explicitly upgrade kmods too.

After a few misadventures, I have a running system again, but am somewhat confused to find that FreeBSD-ports-kmods is a separate repo and that can be on a different branch from FreeBSD-ports. So my question is whether this is a problem, or if it's fine to run these on different branches. I guess from the name these are not base system kmods, but they are not exactly ports either? Can someone explain what's going on?

Here's the output of pkg repos:

FreeBSD-ports: {
    url             : "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:15:amd64/latest",
    enabled         : yes,
    priority        : 0,
    mirror_type     : "SRV",
    signature_type  : "FINGERPRINTS",
    fingerprints    : "/usr/share/keys/pkg"
  }
FreeBSD-ports-kmods: {
    url             : "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:15:amd64/kmods_quarterly_1",
    enabled         : yes,
    priority        : 0,
    mirror_type     : "SRV",
    signature_type  : "FINGERPRINTS",
    fingerprints    : "/usr/share/keys/pkg"
  }
FreeBSD-base: {
    url             : "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:15:amd64/base_release_1",
    enabled         : yes,
    priority        : 0,
    mirror_type     : "SRV",
    signature_type  : "FINGERPRINTS",
    fingerprints    : "/usr/share/keys/pkgbase-15"
  }

 

[SirDice]

FreeBSD-ports-kmods is a separate repo and that can be on a different branch from FreeBSD-ports

You can, but shouldn't. Both need to be on quarterly or both on latest.

I guess from the name these are not base system kmods, but they are not exactly ports either?

They are kernel modules from the ports tree. The base OS kernel modules get upgraded when you upgrade the base OS, thus they should all line up perfectly (15.1 modules for a 15.1 kernel). Kernel modules installed from packages or ports however won't be upgraded when you upgrade the base OS.

The FreeBSD ports repository packages get built for 15.0 because 15.0 is still supported for the next three months. For 99% of the userland applications this is fine, packages built for 15.0 will work just fine on 15.1 (ABI stability). Kernel modules (like graphics/drm-kmod for example) are very much dependent on the EXACT kernel version. Trying to load a 15.0 module on a 15.1 kernel will very likely cause a crash. That's where the FreeBSD-ports-kmods comes in, it has those kernel modules specifically built for 15.1.

When 15.0 is really EoL the FreeBSD-ports repository will switch to building for 15.1 and this 'problem' disappears.

 

[drsnx60]

The KMOD repo is out of sync with PORTS repo is now a major obstacle for installing software like GPU drivers and is hindering users from setting up Desktop environments.

A system software that has an accompanying KMOD must be uppdated in sync.