Re: pre-2.1.90..

Ruud de Rooij (src@dutibp.twi.tudelft.nl)
Wed, 11 Mar 1998 17:40:48 +0100

On 1998/03/10, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> pre-90 does a few other minor things, like for example getting rid of
> kerneld because the new kmod thing is a lot simpler in many ways. Let's
> see what the reaction to that is, but I'm fairly certain that this was a
> major good thing: I've personally never liked kerneld, but kmod seems to
> be a much nicer and more controlled way of handling the same issues that
> kerneld tried to do. I'd actually almost be willing to use the thing
> myself, something that was never true of kerneld.

I like the concept of kmod, although its current form breaks modules that do
an explicit request_module() at module load time, e.g., scsi loading
scsi_hostadapter or parport loading parport_lowlevel.

This is caused by the fact that kmod_thread is blocked on waitpid() waiting
for the modprobe command to complete before it can service a new
request_module().

In some cases, a module being loaded by modprobe does a request_module()
itself; this request is ignored by kmod which is still waiting for modprobe
to complete.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough kernel hacking experience (i.e., zero) to
come up with a fix.

Greetings,

Ruud de Rooij

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