On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 16:34 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 18:12 +0300, Vasiliy Kulikov wrote:

quoted

My proposal is changing request_module("%s", name) to something like
request_module("netdev-%s", name) inside of dev_load() and adding
aliases to related drivers.

AFAIK these interface-name aliases are usually defined by distribution
configuration files rather than within the modules themselves.  And that
behaviour is pretty much obsolete now that we have hotplug and udev.

quoted

This would allow to load only netdev
modules via these ioctls.  I'm not sure what modules should be patches -
at least real physical netdevices have names different from drivers'
names, so they don't need patching.  I suppose the list is not big.

The only modules I can see that declare aliases like this are:

net/ipv4/ip_gre.c:MODULE_ALIAS("gre0");
net/ipv4/ipip.c:MODULE_ALIAS("tunl0");
net/ipv6/sit.c:MODULE_ALIAS("sit0");

Thank you!  These are not handled via udev or anything, it is usefull to
load it via "ifconfig sit0 up", so they do require patching.

I didn't find any modules requiring autoloading except these three.
Good candidate should be "isatap0" as it is seen in ip help, but there
is no such alias.

$ ip tunnel add help 2>&1 | grep mode
          [ mode { ipip | gre | sit | isatap } ] [ remote ADDR ] [ local ADDR ]


I'll send the patch for request_module() and three drivers.


Thanks,

-- 
Vasiliy Kulikov
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments