Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Rusty Russell <rusty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:03 PM, Herbert Xu >>> <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 09:32:02AM +0930, Rusty Russell wrote: >>>>> Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>>>> > Hi Rusty: >>>>> > >>>>> > I don't know why this patch never went into the kernel, even >>>>> > though the corresponding features have been added to modprobe >>>>> > in most if not all distros. >>>>> >>>>> Because Andreas never sent me the patch? This is the first I've *heard* >>>>> of this feature. Looks like it didn't hit lkml either. And what was >>>>> 2/2? >>>> >>>> 2/2 was the patch to actually use this in crc32c. >>>> >>>>> It's not how I would have done this: post-deps are more flexibly done at >>>>> runtime, because the module may have to do work to figure out what to >>>>> pull in. But since it already exists, I'll apply this patch: it doesn't >>>>> cost the kernel anything. >>> >>> But it did cause boot failures. The file modules.softdep file was >>> supposed to be informational until now. That's why depmod put a >>> comment saying to "copy on user's discretion to /etc/modules.d" >>> instead of parsing it directly. >> >> I'm happy to change this macro to create a modinfo line like >> "softdep:<modname>" > > how is that solving the issue that this macro can be used to designate > a mandatory or optional dependency > (https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/10/371)? If we decide the dependency is > mandatory we can very well let modprobe use that dependency during > module load I'm very close to sending Linus a revert commit at this point, since there's no consensus on what it's for. *Clearly* softdep shouldn't indicate a mandatory dependency. We already have a way (several) to make mandatory dependencies! And the "pre:" vs "post:" thing is just weird. If a module wants a post dependency, you can request_module() it from a workqueue. >> ie. tools like mkinitrd could pick it up and try to find a matching >> module, but depmod would ignore it. > > Some mkinitrd-like use whatever depmod/modprobe tells them it's > needed. So kmod still needs to know about it. It sounds like we should create a separate tool, which takes a list of modules and spits out the full pathname of all dependencies. *That* tool should include soft dependencies. >> It's really up to Lucas, since this affects him. > > IMO saying "this is an optional dependency and we can work without" > doesn't buy us much. Distros will end up putting the soft dep in > /etc/modules.d, kmod will always use them anyway and failing to load > the soft dep will fail the module load. I'd like to have no distro > files in /etc/modules.d in future. I assumed modprobe would handle soft dependencies in modules and try to pull them in, but *not* fail if they don't work. The previous way of doing this was: install foo modprobe foo_softdep 2>/dev/null; modprobe --ignore-install foo $CMDLINE_OPTS I agree this logic belongs in the kernel, we just have to figure out exactly how. Cheers, Rusty. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-modules" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
