From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] modules: allow modprobe load regular elf binaries Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2018 12:26:56 -0800 Message-ID: References: <20180306013457.1955486-1-ast@kernel.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Andy Lutomirski Cc: Alexei Starovoitov , "David S. Miller" , Daniel Borkmann , Greg KH , "Luis R. Rodriguez" , Network Development , LKML , kernel-team , Linux API List-Id: linux-api@vger.kernel.org On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 12:01 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > > I assume I'm missing some context here, but why does this need to be > handled by the kernel rather than, say, a change to how modprobe > works? Honestly, the less we have to mess with user-mode tooling, the better. We've been *so* much better off moving most of the module loading logic to the kernel, we should not go back in the old broken direction. I do *not* want the kmod project that is then taken over by systemd, and breaks it the same way they broke firmware loading. Keep modprobe doing one thing, and one thing only: track dependencies and mindlessly just load the modules. Do *not* ask for it to do anything else. Right now kmod is a nice simple project. Lots of testsuite stuff, and a very clear goal. Let's keep kmod doing one thing, and not even have to care about internal kernel decisions like "oh, this module might not be a module, but an executable". If anything, I think we want to keep our options open, in the case we need or want to ever consider short-circuiting things and allowing direct loading of the simple cases and bypassing modprobe entirely. Linus