[arch-dev-public] [RFC] loading kernel modules

Tom Gundersen teg at jklm.no
Mon Jul 23 08:57:52 EDT 2012


Hi guys,

As of linux-3.5 almost all in-kernel modules are autoloaded on demand,
so the need for manually specifying modules to load in MODULES (or
otherwise) is almost gone.

However, for out-of-tree modules, this might not yet be the case. For
this purpose, we now have very simple mechanisms for packages to
instruct initscripts (or systemd) to load (or blacklist) modules at
boot.

In other words, rather than package "foo" having a post-install
message saying "Please add foo_module to MODULES in rc.conf and
blacklist bar_module" it could simply install
/usr/lib/modules-load.d/foo.conf: foo_module
/usr/lib/modprobe.d/foo.conf: blacklist bar_module

The reasoning being that an admin is almost certainly not going to
want to install a package and then not follow the post-install
instructions. Conversely, on un-install (s)he is likely to want to
revert these changes.

On the rare occasions the admin does not want the standard behavior,
it can be overridden by writing (possibly empty) files to
/etc/mod{ules-load,probe}.d/foo.conf

Is this something we'd like to do?

-t

PS:

A quick look shows that at least vhba, virtualbox and fcpci could
benefit from this (though of course the benefits should be evaluated
on a case-by-case basis).


More information about the arch-dev-public mailing list