On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 7:39 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcg...@kernel.org> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 02:17:11PM +0100, Jessica Yu wrote: >> Just some quick questions - are there any plans to use these in-kernel >> module aliases anywhere else? Or are you using them just for debugging? > > As-is for now just debugging, but this could also more easily enable folks to > prototype further evaluation of its uses. IMHO just having this at least > posted > online should suffice the later aspect of enabling folks to prototype.
I confirm that, after the module auto-load discussion where it is clear that we need to improve the infrastructure, this debug information may save some time, maybe someone can automate a script go through modules and then on filesystem, however these patches may show which module lead to load another one, right ? on userspace if there are multiple dependencies it can be difficult I think. > > You're right that one can find aliases in userspace. One of the benefits > of having this dump things on the kernel log is just that you can easily > get the aliases printed out for all modules actually loaded for your system > without much effort. I did find this useful when debugging and found it much > more convenient than scraping modules one by one by hand in userspace. > > I had this implemented since 2016, and I had some ideas to use them in a > functional way, however I first had to knock out a series of of fixes for > kernel/kmod.c and setting up a baseline test infrastructure for kmod > (tools/testing/selftests/kmod/ and lib/test_kmod.c) as such I hadn't had time > to yet come around and finish benchmarking the alias enhancement ideas I had > started evaluating. > > As such having aliases in-kernel currently are only useful for debugging and > prototyping. I would say so, however no strong argument if it should be mainlined. Luis in your commit log you say: "Obviously userspace can be buggy though, and it can lie to us. We currently have no easy way to determine this." Could you please share some info here ? how userspace can be buggy ? Thank you! > Luis -- tixxdz
