On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 06:16:24PM -0500, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> >Why? That just doesn't make sense. Why should I have KMOD turned on to
> >eg. use a joystick? I know, it can make some things easier, but that's a
> >matter of personal preference. If I don't want KMOD, I just insmod
> >joystick.o, and it will get char major 15, because it requests it. Why
> >it should need KMOD?
>
> Two scenarios:
>
> 1) a joystick using application calls:
>
> open ("/dev/joystick", ....)
>
> (or whatever the canonical name for the joystick is). if
> you don't have kmod and have not insmod-ed the relevant module,
> the open(2) call will return with "device not configured"
> or "no such device".
Yes, this is the expected and documented behavior. Nothing wrong with
this. It's the same as saying, "Without KMOD modules autoloading support
modules are not autoloaded", which is quite obvious. So there isn't any
need to disallow this in kernel configuration.
> 2) if a driver itself tries to open other devices in
> the same way, expecting them to be there either via
> direct compilation or insmod, then it won't work
> without tricky manual intervention.
Driver? Open devices? Drivers don't do that ...
> In the case of pppd, I think that it was trying to open /dev/ppp, and
> then later was doing stuff that assumed the existence of the
> compression modules. even though i had them compiled and "in place",
> they were not insmod'ed without manual intervention. thus, pppd will
> not run correctly in this scenario without a user having to figure out
> all the modules that might be needed. yuck (and in the general case,
> non-trivial to do).
Yes. It's as simple as 'if you don't use kmod, you have to insert
modules manually or have them in the kernel'. PPPD will complain about
no kernel PPP support if you don't do that. That's OK.
> note, for example, that ppp_generic and ppp_async do *not* depend on
> the compression modules, but that pppd (and perhaps the ppp driver
> too, not sure about that) requires them. so depmod doesn't help here
> either.
Why should they depend on them? You sure can run an uncompressed PPP
link. And PPPD doesn't require them - it just needs them to be able to
do compression. So, if you insmod them or compile into the kernel, it's
OK. If you have KMOD, the're requested and it's OK. Where is the
problem?
In the old days when Kerneld/KMOD didn't exist, it was all done the
manual way. I see no reason to forbid that now - it's often very useful.
I don't run KMOD on my system. I don't need it. So why should I be
forced to?
-- Vojtech Pavlik SuSE Labs- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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