Built-in modules review

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 14:48 -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Scott James Remnant <scott at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 15:08 +0000, Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> >
> >> Filesystems: we currently have all of the ext2,3,4 filesystems builtin,
> >> plus all of the diagnostics filesystems (procfs et al), and also fuse.
> >> Other than FUSE these are all boot essential.  I believe FUSE is
> >> required for automounting which needs confirmation.  No changes
> >> required.
> >>
> > FUSE is built-in because we have no way of loading it
> > otherwise; /dev/fuse would not exist without the module loaded, and fuse
> > is generally used by user processes which don't have permission to
> > modprobe.
> 
> Is this because fuse is broken as a module, or because it just needs
> to be loaded at boot because users can't do it without an escalation
> of privileges? If it's the latter then why can't we load it
> dynamically at boot time?
> 
Load it dynamically by doing what?

We have two module loading facilities:

 - load because a kernel uevent contains a MODALIAS string that expands
   to the module name (ie. load on hardware)

 - load because the user opens the device node (load on demand)

Since fuse has no hardware, and no device node until loaded, neither of
these methods works.

So we build it in.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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