Lucas De Marchi [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:03 PM, Herbert Xu
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 09:32:02AM +0930, Rusty Russell wrote:

quoted

Herbert Xu [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Hi Rusty:

I don't know why this patch never went into the kernel, even
though the corresponding features have been added to modprobe
in most if not all distros.

Because Andreas never sent me the patch?  This is the first I've *heard*
of this feature.  Looks like it didn't hit lkml either.  And what was
2/2?

2/2 was the patch to actually use this in crc32c.

quoted

It's not how I would have done this: post-deps are more flexibly done at
runtime, because the module may have to do work to figure out what to
pull in.  But since it already exists, I'll apply this patch: it doesn't
cost the kernel anything.

But it did cause boot failures. The file modules.softdep file was
supposed to be informational until now. That's why depmod put a
comment saying to "copy on user's discretion to /etc/modules.d"
instead of parsing it directly.

I'm happy to change this macro to create a modinfo line like
"softdep:<modname>"

ie. tools like mkinitrd could pick it up and try to find a matching
module, but depmod would ignore it.

It's really up to Lucas, since this affects him.

Cheers,
Rusty.