Re: debian and UDEV

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 10:44:21AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

> Which is still stupid not to have in the kernel API as feedback from
> the event manager and have insmod optionaly block.

For that to work you should make device discovery synchronous everywhere
in the kernel. That would be a big change, and then people would start
complaining that the boot process suddenly takes 10-20 minutes instead
of 10-20 seconds (because the kernel now has to wait for time-out for
non-existing devices which you never noticed before thanks to the
asynchronous discovery).

And what do you want to do for hot-pluggable devices like USB or SATA?
Should insmod block forever if there is a free SATA port just in case
the sysadmin wants to plug in a disk later? And if not, why is this case
different from insmod returning immediately and reporting all plugged-in
disks later? You _must_ be able to handle the "disk-plugged-in-later"
case and that should "just work" for the already-plugged-in disks as
well...

I think it is pointless to bitch about udev without a clean proposal how
should Debian handle hotplug events (including cases like when the
device containing the root file system is literally plugged in _after_
the kernel/initrd has been loaded).

Gabor

-- 
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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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