[ANNOUNCE] kmod 30

From: Lucas De Marchi
Date: Thu Jun 30 2022 - 11:38:03 EST


kmod 30 is out:

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/kmod/kmod-30.tar.xz
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/kmod/kmod-30.tar.sign

- Improvements
- Stop adding duplicate information on modules.builtin.alias.bin, just use
the modules.builtin.bin index

- Speedup depmod, particularly under qemu with emulated arch, by
avoiding a lot of open/read/close of modules.alias.bin. On an
emulated ARM rootfs, depmod with only 2 modules was taking ~32s
vs ~0.07s now.

- Add kmod_module_new_from_name_lookup() which allows doing a lookup by
module name, without considering the aliases. Other than that search
order is similar to kmod_module_new_from_lookup().

- modinfo learned the --modname option to explicitely show information
about the module, even if there is an alias with the same name. This
allows showing information about e.g. kernel/lib/crc32.ko, even if
kernel also exports a crc32 alias in modules.alias:

alias crc32 crc32_pclmul
alias crc32 crc32_generic

Same behavior will be used to other modules and to aliases provided
by user/distro.

- depmod.conf learned a new "excludedir" directive so distro/user can
configure more directories to be excluded from its search, besides
the hardcoded values "build" and "source".

- Better group modprobe options on help output under "Management, Query and General".

- modprobe learned a --wait <MSEC> option to be used together with -r
when removing a module. This allows modprobe to keep trying the
removal if it fails because the module is still in use. An exponential backoff
time is used for further retries.

The wait behavior provided by the kernel when not passing O_NONBLOCK
to delete_module() was removed in v3.13 due to not be used and the
consequences of having to support it in the kernel. However there may
be some users, particularly on testsuites for individual susbsystems, that
would want that. So provide a userspace implementation inside modprobe for
such users. "rmmod" doesn't have a --wait as it remains a bare minimal over
the API provided by the kernel. In future the --wait behavior can be added
to libkmod for testsuites not exec'ing modprobe for module removal.

- kmod_module_remove_module() learned a new flag to silence output when
caller wants to handle them - this is particularly important for the
--wait flag to modprobe, as it's not desired to keep seeing error messages
while waiting for the module to be unused.

- Add SM3 hash algo support to modinfo output, as already available in the kernel.

- Bug Fixes
- Fix modinfo output when showing information for a .ko module when running
on a kernel that has that module as builtin.

- Fix kmod_module_new_from_lookup() returning > 0 rather than 0
when it matches an alias.

- Fix modinfo segfault when module doesn't exist.

- Add missing function in the html documentation: kmod_get_dirname().

- Fix modprobe incorrectly handling number of arguments when prepending values from
MODPROBE_OPTIONS environment variable.

- Fix modprobe -r --remove-dependencies and since "dependencies" was a
misnomer, add the preferred argument option: "--remove-holders". This
is the same name used by the kernel. It allows users to also remove
other modules holding the one that is being removed.

- Fix off-by-one in max module name length in depmod.

- Infra/internal
- Start some changes in the out-of-tree test modules in kmod so they are useful
for being really inserted in the kernel rather than relying on kmod's mock
interface. This helps manual testing and may be used to exercise to test
changes in the kernel.

Shortlog is below:

HuaxinLu (1):
libkmod: Support SM3 hash algorithm

Lucas De Marchi (30):
libkmod: Prefer builtin index over builtin.alias
depmod: Do not duplicate builtin index
depmod: Stop opening modules.modinfo once per module
test-initstate: Check for negative value on error
libkmod-module: Fix return code for kmod_module_new_from_lookup()
gitignore: ignore gtk-doc.make
libkmod: Add helper function to iterate lookup options
libkmod: Update docs about indexes order
libkmod: Add lookup from module name
modinfo: Update help message with "modulename"
modinfo: Allow to force arg as module name
libkmod: Fix use of sizeof instead of ARRAY_SIZE
docs: Add missing functions to documentation
modprobe: Rename rmmod_do_deps_list
modprobe: Fix holders removal
modprobe: move check for remove_holders to caller
modprobe: Make rmmod_do_module() contain all the removal sequence
depmod: Fix writing over array length
modprobe: re-use modname variable
modprobe: Move -R to "Query options"
libkmod: Allow to ignore log message on module removal
module-playground: Add debugfs entry in mod-simple
util: Add time-related functions from testsuite
util: Add msec variants for time-related functions
util: Add exponential backoff sleep
testsuite: Add tests for sleep calculation
modprobe: Add --wait
Keep only one readme
README: Update optional dependencies
kmod 30

Luis Chamberlain (1):
libkmod: add a library notice log level print

Masahiro Yamada (2):
modprobe: fix the NULL-termination of new_argv
modprobe: remove unneeded variable str_start

Michal Suchanek (1):
libkmod: Set builtin to no when module is created from path.

Saul Wold (1):
depmod: Add support for excluding a directory

Yauheni Kaliuta (1):
libkmod-module: check "new_from_name" return value in get_builtin


Thank you all for the contributions.


Lucas De Marchi