Re: [PATCH] vt: Add enable module parameter

[Jocelyn Falempe]

On 26/01/2026 11:30, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 11:20:21AM +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 10:43:35AM +0100, Jocelyn Falempe wrote:
> > > On 26/01/2026 10:33, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 10:21:50AM +0100, Jocelyn Falempe wrote:
> > > > > This allows to build the kernel with CONFIG_VT enabled, and choose
> > > > > on the kernel command line to enable it or not.
> > > >
> > > > This says what is happening, but not why?
> > > >
> > > > > Add vt.enable=1 to force enable, or vt.enable=0 to force disable.
> > > >
> > > > Why are we using a 1990's technology for a new feature?  What is this
> > > > going to allow to have happen?  Who needs/wants this?  Who will use it?
> > > > For what?
> > >
> > > The goal is to ease the transition to disable CONFIG_VT.
> > >
> > > So if this is merged, you can boot without VT on any Linux distribution,
> > > without rebuilding the kernel.
> >
> > But that's a distro-specific thing, the distro should be enabling or
> > disabling the option as it needs, it should not be a user-configurable
> > boot-time selection option as userspace depends entirely on this either
> > being there or not.  Why would you have a kernel with both options but
> > userspace without that?
>
> And to follow-up on this, if a distro wanted to support this, why not
> just provide 2 different kernel images?  One with this enabled and one
> without?  It's up to the distro to support such a thing, not the kernel
> community, right?

That's clearly not an option, they will prefer to keep VT enabled 
forever than adding yet another kernel package. And for distributions 
that already have kernel and kernel-rt, that means maintaining 4 kernels 
for all combination.

> thanks,
>
> greg k-h