https://access.redhat.com/solutions/30082

 SOLUTION 已验证 - 已更新 2015年九月30日21:14 - 

English 

环境

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all versions

问题

• What is the purpose/use of the kernel-headers and kernel-devel packages?
• Is it necessary to upgrade these packages along with the kernel upgrade?

决议

What is the purpose/use of the kernel-headers and kernel-devel packages?

• The kernel-headers package includes the C header files that specify the interface between the kernel and the user space libraries or programs. It is needed when building a program.

Raw

# rpm -qi kernel-headers
...
Kernel-headers includes the C header files that specify the interface
between the Linux kernel and userspace libraries and programs. The
header files define structures and constants that are needed for
building most standard programs and are also needed for rebuilding the
glibc package.

• The kernel-devel package provides the kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules against the specified kernel. If your system does not need to compile/build any third-party kernel modules like HBA dirvers, display card dirvers, the kernel-devel package is not necessary to be installed.

Raw

rpm -qi kernel-devel
...
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.

Is it necessary to upgrade these packages along with the kernel upgrade?

• The latest kernel can be installed in the system without the kernel-headers and kernel-devel package if there are no certain reasons to use it, for example, for compiling a C code or developing/building a 3rd-party kernel module.

• In addition, it is even possible to use a different version of the kernel-headers package with the running kernel in the system since the kernel headers does not have any dependencies on the other packages.