Re: kmod fix

Marcin Dalecki (dalecki@cs.net.pl)
Fri, 13 Mar 1998 13:19:15 -0700

Kirk Petersen wrote:
>
> > > Now, anyone know how correct the above analysis is? I didn't
> > > have a chance to look at the "offending" modules much (but will certainly
> > > be doing that tonight).
> >
> > With kerneld, we had the ability to do ksystem() from a module. Have we
> > lost this ability ?
>
> Well, ksystem() passed a message to kerneld, so yes, we lost this
> ability. Now, could someone tell me what ksystem() did? I did a search
> through 2.1.89 and nothing used it. I read through the kerneld source
> (because all ksystem() did was pass a message to kerneld) and it didn't
> help much.
>

Yes what it did was nearly the same what the libc system() function
does.
Therefore the name. The only difference was: it did it out of the
kernel!
Please think just a second about the possible races circularities and so
on an so on ... No wonder anybody used it in the kernel. Tought some
times ago there was one exception: smbfs. Tought accidentally I know
Volker personally, Some short discussion about it between us revealved
that this was really a sign of a bad design in smbfs.

BTW. there where many other things which kerneld was supposed to do,
which *nobody* was st... to use, like: request_route, request_blaker and
therelike.

-- 
=========================================================================
  In real life:         System Programmer at AIS AXON GmbH


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