?????: modprobe woes

[Bernhard Fischer]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 09:18:45PM +0300, Timo Teräs wrote:
>Vladimir Dronnikov wrote:
>> Wouldn't you try BB small modutils, Timo? It is designed to be clean
>> and requires zero configuration. It is also open for feature requests.
>
>It has exactly the same problems:
>- it loads all module information to memory (might be more memory
>  conservative, though)
>- it considers only the first matching alias entry (if I read the code
>  correctly)
>
>Also it missing functionality that we rely on (e.g. blacklisting some
>modules and adding options in module-init-tools compatible file).
>
>I haven't tested it in real life how it performs. But I'd expect similar
>performance. As stated earlier the above causes: major performance
>problems on old box (50 * modprobe at startup = 10 seconds delay vs.
>1-2 seconds if it were module-init-tools speed) and it fails to load some
>modules that are probed by alias (e.g. "aes" where the first matching
>module requires special hardware).
>
>I can test performance of modprobe-small in real life tomorrow.

That would be helpful, yes. Perhaps you can provide profiles from
module-init-tools vs. normal-modprobe vs. modprobe-new-from-vladimir ?
>
>I'd rather have the non-small (not too many hundred bytes larger) version
>that is module-init-tools compatible and fast for my purposes.
>
>So I'm offering to write a module-init-tools compatible modprobe that
>performs well and hopefully is smaller than the current "big" modprobe.

Well, very recently we started to grow an alternative module loader set
in busybox (actually Vladimir did), and since this new one is not yet
fully settled, it would be better to base off that one rather than
spending time to tackle this problem for a third (or at least sixth, if
you take modutils and module-init-tools into account) time.

>But can test it only on 2.6 kernel. Would it be accepted as a replacement

I personally do not need 2.0 nor 2.[12345] support. I'd say, just go
for 2.6 and point people to the big utils that were recent when their
kernel version was current and recommended. Of course that may be just
me ;)