Re: [klibc] klibc and what's the next step?

H. Peter Anvin
2006-07-11T19:38:48Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Olaf Hering wrote:
>>> It's a proposal, and I personally think it makes sense. If done, it is
>>> obviously very important that it doesn't change the overall operation of
>>> the system.
>> I think you can have that today, parted uses BLKPG to add and remoe
>> things. No idea what the benefit would be, but thats not relavant for
>> kinit or no kinit.
>
> The notion that the kernel itself should do no partition parsing at all
> was advocated by Andries Brouwer. I violently disagree. Anything that the
> lack of which makes a normal system basically unusable should go into the
> kernel.
>

Does that mean "in kernel space", "in the kernel distribution" or "in
memory completely under the control by the kernel?" That is really what
this is about.

There could be a klibc-build binary in rootfs, build at the time the
kernel was built, that can be invoked by the kernel in parallel with
/sbin/hotplug.

> Yes, the kernel rules are heuristics, but so would inevitably any
> user-level rules be too, so I don't want to move partition detection to
> initrd or similar.

The whole point of putting klibc in the kernel tree is so we can do this
kind of stuff without breaking the stock kernel build as a
self-contained entity. Without that objective, Olaf is right that it is
not necessary.

-hpa