?????: modprobe woes

[Timo Teräs]

Vladimir Dronnikov wrote:
> Enough said, am waiting for code.

Ok, I've made more progress on my module-init-tools compatible
modutils than expected. It's still work-in-progress, but atleast
it works on some level (haven't tested if a machine boots with
it yet). So expect bugs.

I did several bloatchecks with different configs and:
my-all-config-enabled vs. vanilla bbmodutils: -2400
my-no-pretty-lsmod-or-symbols vs. vladimir: +300

The support for pre-2.6 modules is not there. But I did try to
make the code so that it'd be easy to add afterwards. Also
this is why the patch removes so much stuff: the pre-2.6 modules
need to be relocated in userland. That's probably what Vladimir
compared against when reporting that his code is 10 kB smaller
then bb-modutils. Also I noted that depmod has been broken
for pre-2.6 modules for ages (I think you need to do the
dependency detection manually by looking what symbols it
imports and which module exports them).

Also depmod now produces modules.dep like module-init-tools:
it contains all dependencies for given .ko (even the implied
ones). It generates slightly bigger .dep files, but modprobe
code is smaller. It should be easy to add back the pruning
of implied dependencies and making modprobe recalculate all
dependencies. It just takes more memory, code and is slower.

Initial performance looks good enough. It's probably a bit
worse than module-init-tools or vladimirs code, but it's
still a lot faster than the vanilla bbmodutils. And the code
is small and compatible with standard module-init-tools.

I also tweaked the config a bit. Hopefully it makes more
sense now.

So, the code is at:
http://solidboot.com/~fabled/bb-modprobe-v2.diff

Feedback is welcome.

- Timo