Re: general hotplug/udev questions

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 12:53:34PM -0700, rich turner wrote:
> because my linuxrc does not create events or mount /lib/klibc/events in
> the initrd, then boot.coldplug does not load the network modules.

That is correct.

> i realize i can load the network modules in the initrd and everything
> would be golden, but that is not the purpose of the initrd. in my
> opinion we already do to much in the initrd because the distributions
> dont do enough (or do it correctly) in their init scripts. we try to
> keep the initrd's purpose to do only enough to mount the root
> filesystem.

Sorry, but that's not the way we are all moving toward.  With initramfs
and kinit we are pushing more and more of the early boot stuff into a
initramfs/initrd image to get it out of the kernel itself.

> it is important that our process remain generic across all distributions
> because we need to support many other distributions.

I wish you the best of luck.  Providing custom kernel images for
different distros, while ignoring how they do their initrd/initramfs
boot sequence seems like a futile way to go.  Not to mention breaking
your customer's service contracts with their distro :)

> does anyone have an opinion as to whether suse's current method will
> become the standard?

Is there ever a "standard" for Linux?  :)

Seriously, I think something like this will become more common as it
solves a lot of problems people have with early boot processes.  Look at
how Red Hat solves it (in a different way, but with the same results.)

> it appears that udevstart.static creates events but /sbin/udevstart does
> not. why is that?
> 
> is /sbin/hotplugevenrecorder an executable being distributed by suse or
> is it something that will be coming in the maintained udev?

http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/hotplug/udev.git;a=blob;hš3c3e197c6cf3972c0f9d910ac206aed3df66e7;hbŒ11a2f0ff27264513033691bb818262f009fe4e;f=udeveventrecorder.c
look like what you are looking for?

> even though we use udevstart in the initrd, is there any real purpose to
> echoing something (/sbin/udev, /sbin/udevsend, /bin/true) out
> to /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug while in the initrd?

Depends on how you want to catch hotplug events.

Note, a lot of this has changed recently in suse's kernel.  Take a look
at opensuse beta 2 for examples of this.

> it is my experience that udev only handles devices that you would expect
> to find in /dev. how could it have any effect on network interfaces? is
> this a product of hotplug or udev?

Both.  udev can handle network devices just fine, has for years.

thanks,

greg k-h


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