Jenkins polling for Ubuntu Kernel upgrades?

Question

Say I wanted to distribute a binary kernel module for a custom in-house piece of hardware to users inside my company. The ideal situation is that it requires no compilation on the part of the user. I just want to use the standard apt-get/software update GUI tools to distribute it to our users.

For our purposes here, we'll assume that I have a Jenkins instance set up to build said kernel module, package it into a .deb archive and add it to an in-house APT repo.

This situation works, however I have to manually monitor when new Kernels are released for the different versions of Ubuntu and kick off each new kernel build manually.

What I'd like to find is a way for Jenkins to automatically poll for kernel updates in the Jenkins APT repo and kick off a new build of the driver for the new kernel. Has anyone done anything similar before? How did you go about doing it?

Answer 1

Sounds like something a relatively simple script could do, similar to how you'ld trigger builds in a git post-receive hook for instance. In pseudocode:

sudo apt-get update
kversion=$(apt-cache policy kernel | sed .....)
if [ our module not yet available for this kernel ]; then
    wget http://jenkins/url_to_trigger_parametrized_build
fi