From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754492Ab0CGQhx (ORCPT ); Sun, 7 Mar 2010 11:37:53 -0500 Received: from acsinet11.oracle.com ([141.146.126.233]:38810 "EHLO acsinet11.oracle.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752767Ab0CGQhw (ORCPT ); Sun, 7 Mar 2010 11:37:52 -0500 Message-ID: <4B93D63B.1040403@oracle.com> Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:37:15 -0800 From: Randy Dunlap Organization: Oracle Linux Engineering User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091209 Fedora/3.0-3.fc11 Thunderbird/3.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: Alexey Dobriyan , don.mullis@gmail.com, david@fromorbit.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Christoph Hellwig Subject: Re: modules, "modules" and CONFIG_LIST_SORT References: <20100307091223.GA4895@x200> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Source-IP: acsmt354.oracle.com [141.146.40.154] X-Auth-Type: Internal IP X-CT-RefId: str=0001.0A090206.4B93D645.0102:SCFMA4539814,ss=1,fgs=0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 03/07/10 03:23, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Sun, 7 Mar 2010, Alexey Dobriyan wrote: >> >> Unpleasant side effect of the change is that some modules stop being >> true modules, i. e. admin is unable to start using them without reboot >> if kernel was compiled without that tiny amount of core kernel. >> >> Having used this feature several times, I think it'd be correct >> to preserve this behaviour, at least not regress for those modules >> which benefitted from it. For modules which were always "modules" (ipv6) >> it's fine to continue. >> >> Can we declare some policy about it? >> >> And revert LIST_SORT commit if yes. > > Yeah, I think that in cases like this, you have a very good argument: > LIST_SORT enables code that isn't that large, and is clearly very generic. > > And changing the config later and trying to compile and install a module > is rather sane. And if that new module needs LIST_SORT, you're screwed > because it didn't get compiled in originally. > > Honestly, personally I'd rather have a real library that modules can link > to _before_ even loading into kernel space, but that's not how we've > traditionally done things. So I guess we should just revert that commit. xfs also needs "select LIST_SORT". I posted a patch for that a few days ago and now Christoph Hellwig has asked me to send the patch directly to Linus, but if Linus is going to revert the 'config LIST_SORT' patch, I'll skip it. -- ~Randy