Re: [ANNOUNCE] hotplug-ng 002 release

[Greg KH]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 11:51:04PM +0200, Per Liden wrote:
> On Mon, 9 May 2005, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 12:52:02AM +0200, Per Liden wrote:
> > > On Fri, 6 May 2005, Greg KH wrote:
> > > 
> > > [...]
> > > > Now, with the 2.6.12-rc3 kernel, and a patch for module-init-tools, the
> > > > USB hotplug program can be written with a simple one line shell script:
> > > > 	modprobe $MODALIAS
> > > 
> > > Nice, but why not just convert all this to a call to 
> > > request_module($MODALIAS)? Seems to me like the natural thing to do.
> > 
> > Because that's not the only thing that the hotplug event causes to
> > happen. It's easier to have userspace decide what to do with this 
> > instead.
> 
> Sure, the hotplug event could still be issued so that userspace could do 
> magic things when it wants to (load firmware or whatever), but since the 
> kernel already has all the infrastructure in place to load modules on 
> demand, and it's used all over the place, it doesn't make sense to use a 
> completely different approach here.

Well, do you really want your kernel to be creating 2 userspace programs
for every device in sysfs that is created?  Remember, we can't just not
emit that hotplug event, too many programs need it....

> Also, since most people never need to do anything except modprobe, they 
> can still have a working system without any scripts what so ever... again 
> just like normal on demand module loading.

Lots of programs do lots of stuff other than modprobe on hotplug events.
Look at HAL for just one example.

thanks,

greg k-h
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