Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755889AbYGPAwR (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:52:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753085AbYGPAwA (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:52:00 -0400 Received: from www.church-of-our-saviour.org ([69.25.196.31]:49843 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751921AbYGPAwA (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:52:00 -0400 Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:51:33 -0400 From: Theodore Tso To: Linus Torvalds Cc: david@lang.hm, Marcel Holtmann , David Woodhouse , Frans Pop , jeff@garzik.org, arjan@infradead.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [GIT *] Allow request_firmware() to be satisfied from in-kernel, use it in more drivers. Message-ID: <20080716005133.GK8185@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , Linus Torvalds , david@lang.hm, Marcel Holtmann , David Woodhouse , Frans Pop , jeff@garzik.org, arjan@infradead.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <1216149637.27242.65.camel@violet.holtmann.net> <1216150616.27455.377.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> <1216151640.27242.90.camel@violet.holtmann.net>

MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@mit.edu X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2922 Lines: 55 On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 04:42:52PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, david@lang.hm wrote: > > > > becouse the tools that wrote the initrd already put the modules in. I don't > > maintain those tools, they came with the distro. we're just asking to not > > require those tools to be updated immediatly. > > But mkinitrd (which is the _only_ thing that people tend to use to write > initrd's - is there even anything else) has already been doing this for > years, as has been pointed out several times. Actually, there is also mkinitramfs (which is what Debian and Ubuntu use), and Yaird (Yet Another mkinitrd). Also, the distro's tend to heavily customize mkinitrd in general, so there is no guarantee that just because two distro's use some tool that happens to be named mkinitrd that the two tools have much in common with each other.... This is highly unfortunate, and I've often argued that we probably would have been better off if we had included an mkinitrd tool as part of the kernel sources to make life easier instead of having every single distro do their own thing; it would also make it easier to run a newer kernel on an older enterprise distro --- I remember the pain trying to make a 2.6.16 kernel boot on a RHEL4 base system two years ago; I don't want to even think about what would happen with something more modern at this point. > If it's literally just an issue of an mkinitrd that is too damn old, why > don't we just make that test at kernel build time. *EXACTLY* the same way > we test for compilers that are too old, and refuse to build with them? For one reason, because there's more than one mkinitrd. FC9 ships with mkinitrd 6.0.52; OpenSuSE ships with mkinitrd 2.1, and the sources don't look even vaguely similar to one another. For example, Red Hat's mkinitrd uses nash, which is a maddingly useless shell that made it near-impossible to debug why a 2.6.16 kernel wasn't booting on a RHEL-4 system on a LS-21 blade. OpenSuSE's mkinitrd ships with bash, and Debian/Ubuntu will give you a busybox shell, which makes life *much* easier to debug when you're trying to figure out why your latest bleeding edge kernel isn't able to mount the root partition out of initrd. - Ted P.S. For bonus points, it would be nice if initrd's included fsck, since it then it would be possible to safely fsck the root partition and not require a reboot if the root partition was modified. But given that every single distro seems to ship their own initrd, not to mention their own init scripts, it's hard to try to push for this sort of change. The amount of distro-specific engineering work probably makes it not worth it. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/