Re: how to have the kernel do udev's job and autoload the right modules ?

[Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

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On 2015-05-06 16:49, David Lang wrote:
> On Wed, 6 May 2015, linuxcbon linuxcbon wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:53 PM, David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:
>>> It's perfectly legitimate to not want to use udev, but that doesn't mean
>>> that the kernel will (or should) do it for you.
>>> David Lang
>>
>> When I boot the kernel without modules, I don't have anything working
>> except "minimal video".
>> I think the kernel should give a minimal support for network, sound and
>> video, even if 0 modules are loaded. I am just dreaming,
>
> You can do that, you just need to build in all the network and sound
> drivers (and pick which driver in the case of conflicts)
>
> There isn't such a thing as a 'generic' network or sound card. For video
> there is 'VGA video' which is used by default on x86 systems, but even
> that's a driver that could be disabled.
>
To explain further, video has a standardized hardware level API (VGA and 
VBE) because it is considered critical system functionality (which is BS 
in my opinion, you can get by just fine with a serial console, but 
that's irrelevant to this discussion).  Sound is traditionally not 
considered critical, and therefore doesn't have a standardized hardware 
API.  Networking is (traditionally) only considered critical if the 
system is booting off the network, and therefore only has a standardized 
API (part of the PXE spec, known as UNDI) on some systems, and even then 
only when they are configured to netboot (and IIRC, also only when the 
processor is in real mode, just like for all other BIOS calls).


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