Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Conveying important upgrade messages to user community

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 20:54 -0700, Duncan wrote:
> I appreciate the distinction between hotplug/coldplug/unplugged that I
> believe you are trying to make, but the possibility does indeed still
> count.

Actually, it does not.  I will explain below where it fits best.

> What happens if a situationally critical pluggable device is plugged in at
> boot?  I don't have a laptop so this particular usual example doesn't
> affect me personally, but I understand it's a big deal for a significant
> segment of the user base.  Some laptop users may use pluggable NICs (wired
> or wireless) and expect the machine to boot to network if they are in at
> boot (coldplugged), yet want the flexibility of booting no-net if it's not
> plugged at boot.  That requires modules and a "coldplug" solution, or it
> won't support either the unplugged at boot option (if the module is
> built-in or loaded unconditionally using modules.autoload) or the plugged
> at boot (coldplug) option (if it's loaded only with hotplug, no coldplug
> script existing).

Adding the module to modules.autoload does not mean it will always load.
It means it will always *try* to load.  There is an important
distinction between the two.

> Personally, I prefer as small a "core" kernel as possible, with only
> keyboard/input and my IDE and fs modules being built-in, to avoid initrd,
> and everything else possible being modularized, including rtc and a few
> other modules I load using modules.autoload and never unload.  Other
> modules (alsa and sound hardware, mainly) get loaded at boot either by
> coldplug or by autoload, but I like the flexibility of being able to
> reload them or simply unload them if need be.

You still haven't given any argument for why "coldplug" is necessary,
since you mention that you could easily use modules.autoload to do this.

> That's one of the good things about Linux and open source in general -- it
> maintains far more admin level choice than typical commercial products, so
> those that want it all built-in can have it that way, while those that
> like slimmed down systems or load all the modules at boot but like the
> flexibility can have it that way as well.  Typical commercial products
> choose one or the other for supportability reasons, regardless of the
> needs or desires of an individual installation/admin.

I totally agree.

> However, I suppose this is getting off topic for the thread..

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operational/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux