In message <20000215162339.Y9944@thepuffingroup.com>you write:
>On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 12:17:10PM -0500, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
>> >modprobe(8)
>>
>> wrong! this is the whole crux of the matter. modprobe will not
>> discover any dependencies between ppp_generic/ppp_async and the
>> compression modules, because there are none. you have to figure out
>> yourself that you need to get the compression modules loaded, since
>> all pppd will do is complain that certain things can't be done,
>> without giving any indication that there is a module or two missing.
>
>Isn't this what /etc/modules.conf is for?
Look, I wasn't trying to make a big deal out of this, but let me try
again: using a kernel with KMOD configured, I had PPP running just
fine, with 4 modules:
ppp_generic
ppp_async
2 compression modules
When I compiled the kernel again without KMOD, PPP will not work,
because it requires manual loading of the modules. I think we all
agree on that, and thats fine with me.
The question is: what modules ? depmod will not discover that the
compression modules need to loaded along with ppp_generic+ppp_async,
because they don't. But pppd cannot load them automatically without
kmod, and will fail if they are not loaded.
So a user has to be able to find out that pppd requires the
compression modules, and ensure that they get loaded. How is a user
supposed to do that in the general case ? The error message from pppd
gives no indication of what the problem is, and with other
applications it could be even worse. Reading the man page for pppd
will provide no indication that it uses modules in any way (and
rightly so - it doesn't, it uses a device driver that may or may not
be present in the kernel).
You might say that this is not really a kernel problem at all, since
it should be pppd's responsibility to tell us what's wrong so that we
can fix it by hand if KMOD is not around. But how can it, when all it
knows that a call to the kernel failed ? It has no way of knowing if
the compression modules were compiled into the kernel or not - it just
knows that an attempted ioctl failed.
So there is a sense in which connected but independent modules like
the PPP set need to be more careful about the presence of absence of
KMOD.
--p
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