[arch-dev-public] kmod-3 in [testing]

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 9:41 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Update- because Dave is awesome, he whipped up some patches and I
tested them that appear to fix the above problem, so the latest kmod
package in [testing] should be safe to test.

Thanks Dave!

-Dan