[arch-projects] [udev][RFC][4/5] removing module-load.sh

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

There has already been some discussion about this on the mailinglist,
so I will just give a short summary here.

At the moment, we have patches against initscripts that will create a
blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d/ (technically it is symlinked to a
file on /run, but that is not important) at boot, based on the MODULES
array in rc.conf.

We still need to decide on exactly what to do with mkinitcpio that
might want to have similar functionality.

With this functionality added to initscripts it means that whatever
modules were blacklisted in rc.conf at boot will not be autoloaded.
This is the main functionality of modules-load.conf, and is as close
to the intended upstream functionality we can get without breaking
compatibility with rc.conf.

Some functionality of load-modules.sh will be lost. However, I think
it for the better (the closer we are to upstream the less weird bugs
we will encounter). That said, if there are good reasons to implement
any of these features I think it is doable. It should be noted that
some of these things make a lot more sense in mkinitcpio than in
initscripts, so if we drop these things from initscripts it does not
mean we have to drop them from mkinitcpio.

1) You have to reboot between adding a module to rc.conf and it being
blacklisted. If this is a problem for you, then use the method
intended by upstream and add your blacklisted modules directly to
/etc/modprobe.d/. I don't think we can avoid this problem.

2) MOD_AUTOLOAD will no longer work. This functionality is not
upstream (correct me if I'm wrong!) and I find it hard to believe it
is useful. As a boot parameter to fix a problem with the initrd it
might be useful (though probably not in its current form, but that is
another discussion), but I would like to remove it from rc.conf. If
there is a use case for this, then we should follow whatever the other
distros are doing and possibly help get this into udev.conf.

3) Can not blacklist modules on the kernel command line. Again, this
is something that might be useful to get a working mkinitcpio so one
can boot into a shell and fix one's system (if you know how to edit
your grub command line then you should be able to set
"init=/bin/bash"), but I don't think this is useful to blacklist
modules from the real system. This _could_ easily be added, but I
believe the correct place for this (if it is deemed useful) would be
upstream.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Tom