The hard-coded path of modprobe doesn't allow distros to put the binary in another place without add links from one place to another. For example, in recent versions of distros like Fedora, Arch and Suse, kmod is the default tool to load modules and they have to create a link from modprobe to kmod binary. kmod relies on argv[0] to know what to do but in future they want to add commands like "kmod load -- modulename", which is not possible if the path to the tool to load modules is hard-coded in kernel.
Moreover, it's already possible to set the path through /proc/sys, but it would have to be done very early in the boot sequence and on every boot since modprobe may be called even before / is mounted. In this scenario booting without and initrd would be more difficult as well. Signed-off-by: Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.mar...@gmail.com> --- init/Kconfig | 7 +++++++ kernel/kmod.c | 2 +- 2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig index 5341d72..72eee1c 100644 --- a/init/Kconfig +++ b/init/Kconfig @@ -1593,6 +1593,13 @@ menuconfig MODULES if MODULES +config DEFAULT_MODULE_LOAD_BIN + string "Default module load binary" + default "/sbin/modprobe -q --" + help + This option determines the default executable to be called when a + module is requested to be loaded via request_module(). + config MODULE_FORCE_LOAD bool "Forced module loading" default n diff --git a/kernel/kmod.c b/kernel/kmod.c index 70df90b..1828542 100644 --- a/kernel/kmod.c +++ b/kernel/kmod.c @@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ static DECLARE_RWSEM(umhelper_sem); /* modprobe_path is set via /proc/sys. */ -char modprobe_path[KMOD_PATH_LEN] = "/sbin/modprobe -q --"; +char modprobe_path[KMOD_PATH_LEN] = CONFIG_DEFAULT_MODULE_LOAD_BIN; static void free_modprobe_argv(struct subprocess_info *info) { -- 1.8.2.2 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/