RE: [gentoo-user] Re: InitRAMFS - boot expert sought

[Mike Edenfield]

> From: Alan McKinnon [mailto:alan.mckinnon@×××××.com]

> OK, semantics. Let me re-phrase:
>
> Why is a third party script, running in the context of the udev universe,
> indiscriminately allowed to launch daemons at early boot time?
>
> I don't think I agree with Neil in that this is a udev design flaw (as any
"fix" will
> be worse than the "flaw"). Instead it looks to me like a classic case of
>
> "You are free to do anything you want but if you break it you keep the
> pieces. If you do something stupid, it's not my problem and you're on your
> own."

This is, unfortunately, the biggest drawback to having a commercial entity
in charge of doing the software development: this kind of attitude stops
applying. Gentoo's developers, for example, would really like for people to
use Gentoo, and work hard to make Gentoo useable, but if you start with the
threats of "I'm gonna stop using your OS unless you fix this RIGHT NOW!"
they'll probably just roll their eyes and ignore you. RedHat has a
*commercial* interest in people using RedHat, even the non-commercial
versions, and if their *customers* start filing bugs like "I cannot make my
Bluetooth keyboard work with my nfs mounted /usr that plays a ring tone
through alsa when I mount it", they are much more motivated to fix it.

> I see nothing wrong with udev applying some reasonable constraints such as
> clearly documenting at what point in the boot process udev is in a
position to
> arbitrarily run anything. Earlier than that point, "anything" does not
actually
> apply.

I don't think it's a design flaw, as much as it's a possible point of
improvement for udev. It would be useful if udev could somehow distinguish
between "early" and "late" devices. This doesn't eliminate the problem
entirely: nothing is stopping you from, say, telling udev that mounting /usr
requires /usr/mountme. But if you did something that silly, it would
obviously be your fault.

I think there are some options for how udev could be better here, it's just
that they all seem to be a lot of risk; as much risk or more as just saying
"don't do that or use an initramfs." Off the top of my head:

* udev could enforce that point you mention, and allow device scripts to
explicitly say "defer trying to configure me until after $KEYPOINT has been
reached."
* udev could keep track of dependencies between devices or device scripts
and allow one to say "don't run me until $DEVICE is also present"
* udev could keep track of prerequisite triggers for device scripts, and
allow one to say "don't run me until /usr/bin/alsaconf exists, but run me as
soon as that appears."
* udev could keep track of failed devices, and include a command-line switch
like --reprocess; the init process could launch udev, allow whatever fails
to fail, mount /usr, then tell udev to try again.

As I understand it, the architecture of udev (and the kernel) makes many of
these difficult; udev events are processed individually, isolated from each
other. It has no concept of things like "when I'm done configuring devices"
or "devices that are waiting to be configured after this one". Though
keeping track of failed devices seems like it would not be terribly
difficult, as long as you could distinguish btween devices that are fatal
failures vs. transient ones.

Again, I'm not faulting the udev team for not doing those things. They
either do a lot of work to update the behavior of udev to support a
configuration they think is invalid and broken, or they simply tell people
to stop using the invalid or broken configuration. If there were a clear
consensus that the configuration was not, in fact, broken, then I could
possibly see where they might be expected (from a /community/ perspective,
clearly they have no /formal/ obligations to any of us) to put in that
effort. But the consensus seems largely weighted towards agreeing with them,
or at least not caring either way.

--Mike