Re: build initramfs faster

[Dennis Schridde <devurandom-hi6Y0CQ0nG0@public.gmane.org>]

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Hi John and list!

Am Dienstag, 28. Februar 2012, 11:53:43 schrieb John Reiser:
> I suggest that modprobe could be extended with a command-line flag
> to read driver names from stdin, and to label the output lines with
> the input driver name (suggested syntax: a prefix line  :<driver>\n
> before any output corresponding to an input <driver>.)  Then a single
> invocation of modprobe could process all drivers.
Since libkmod exists (I don't know how much of modprobe it implements), can't 
you just write a small dedicated tool using it, that does the dependency 
discovery? That should be as fast and small as you can get.

In case modinfo could be used, I think it could also ease things a little, 
since it already does formatted output:
# modinfo unix doesnotexist btrfs
filename:       /lib/modules/3.2.6-gentoo/kernel/net/unix/unix.ko
alias:          net-pf-1
license:        GPL
depends:        
intree:         Y
vermagic:       3.2.6-gentoo SMP mod_unload modversions 
ERROR: Module doesnotexist not found.
filename:       /lib/modules/3.2.6-gentoo/kernel/fs/btrfs/btrfs.ko
license:        GPL
alias:          devname:btrfs-control
alias:          char-major-10-234
depends:        libcrc32c,zlib_deflate
intree:         Y
vermagic:       3.2.6-gentoo SMP mod_unload modversions 

Dunno if that is enough error reporting for your case, but certainly you can 
destinguish the different drivers by either a "filename:" line, or an ERROR 
line. And since modinfo does not consider the /etc/modprobe.d files, as was 
recently pointed out, you can maybe extend modinfo to do so based on a 
commandline flag - code copied from modprobe (or maybe already existing in 
libkmod)? That would still require you to write the read-from-stdin code, 
though...

--Dennis

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