On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Dave Reisner
Hey all,
I've just dropped kmod-3 into testing as a replacement for module-init-tools. This is still a young project, but it has a lot of support from active people, and I (as well as Tom) have been working closely with upstream to flesh out and fix bugs.
For the most part, you should not notice any difference. kmod was designed as a drop-in replacement for m-i-t, and all the binaries should exist with the (mostly) the same options. Whenever possible, options or features marked deprecated in m-i-t were removed, such as:
- parsing of depmod/modprobe config for files not ending in .conf - modprobe's -l, --list options
IMPORTANT: In line with the first change, it needs to be pointed out that we will no longer package /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf. This means that if you wrote to that file, it will be .pacsave'd on removal of m-i-t and you must rename it. We will continue to ship what used to be called /etc/depmod.d/depmod.conf, but rename it /lib/depmod.d/search.conf. This will be a read only file -- users should put their own tweaks in /etc/depmod.d.
One other thing you might notice is that kmod doesn't currently include man pages. I don't consider this a loss -- the m-i-t manpages did not provide full coverage, nor did the command line help. kmod's binaries all currently have full coverage of options via -h, --help.
Lastly, there's an accompanying mkinitcpio update to account for some extra verbosity of kmod's modprobe and depmod tools. You do *not* need to regenerate your initramfs images unless you feel so inclined.
Have fun!
Or don't. Not to rain on Dave's parade (this isn't his fault), but unless you want to sit at your initrd shell for a half hour un-breaking stuff, I'd recommend steering clear of this package and sticking with the old but proven module-init-tools. This package causes modprobe when called by udev to randomly not load modules or something; first noticable with uhci_hcd and my mouse (trivial), later with ahci on boot (not cool, not having disk drives). **Tip**: if you get screwed, call `udevadm trigger` a few times, it seems to knock some sense into the system. You can do this in the initrd environment too. -Dan