From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Alexander E. Patrakov" Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 09:55:36 +0000 Subject: Re: Non-hardware devices like loop: another idea Message-Id: <40597218.7010509@ums.usu.ru> List-Id: References: <200403122003.00557.patrakov@ums.usu.ru> In-Reply-To: <200403122003.00557.patrakov@ums.usu.ru> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org Greg KH wrote: >On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 08:03:00PM +0500, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > > >>I found my implementation rather clumsy and while implementing it I decided >>that it would be better to just mark such modules and modprobe tham all, and >>make the hotplug script modprobe other stuff. I decided to start implementing >>such mark... and found that it has already been done, so actually no patches >>are needed except for the udev initscript! >> >>I am talking about /lib/modules//modules.alias. >> >> > >Take a look at a distro's modules.alias file. With your scheme you >would have them load every possible module. Not a good idea :) > > Did that (both for Debian distribution and for the kernel source - grepped for MODULE_*ALIAS*'es that result in char-major or block-major entry in the modules.alias file). The junk is: 1) watchdog timers - they share the same alias which is not a good thing anyway 2) old cdroms like sbpcd - they won't load anyway on my computer 3) dv1394 and friends - we do need to blacklist them Missing things are: 1) psmouse 2) ide-cd 3) maybe ACPI, but it is not accessible via /dev and therefore it is of no interest to udev So maybe we do need to mark such software-only modules via special entries in .modinfo sections and not rely upon existing *major aliases. The idea remains the same: probe all modules with such mark set. I proposed to (mis-)use the presence of *major alias as such a mark. Yes, I agree that not everybody needs the nbd module and with my approach, it will get loaded. But we already disagree with loading the module upon demand from an application accessing the non-existing device node, and therefore we have either to load the module at boot time or not to load it at all. Oh, there is also a possibility of utilizing these char-major aliases for autoloading modules on demand with device nodes being already created, and this is what my earlier clumsy approach is about. Do you want to see my module-init-tools and kernel patches for that approach? -- Alexander E. Patrakov ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id70&alloc_id638&op=click _______________________________________________ Linux-hotplug-devel mailing list http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net Linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-hotplug-devel