Capabilities for loading network modules [LWN.net]

Capabilities for loading network modules

Posted Mar 5, 2011 15:51 UTC (Sat) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
Parent article: Capabilities for loading network modules

But Miller's complaint is more substantial, as anything that used to do "ifconfig sit0", for example, will no longer work.

That's not the problem - the networking core and these modules will be changed at the same time to use the 'netdev-' prefix. The problem is with module aliases which some distributions (and individual sysadmins) configured as a way of auto-loading net drivers before the introduction of udev, and which they may still rely on some cases. These of course will not have the 'netdev-' prefix.

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Capabilities for loading network modules

Posted Mar 5, 2011 16:17 UTC (Sat) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> > But Miller's complaint is more substantial, as anything that used to do
> > "ifconfig sit0", for example, will no longer work.

> That's not the problem - the networking core and these modules will be
> changed at the same time to use the 'netdev-' prefix. The problem is with
> module aliases which some distributions (and individual sysadmins)
> configured as a way of auto-loading net drivers before the introduction of
> udev, and which they may still rely on some cases. These of course will
> not have the 'netdev-' prefix.

That line from the article was referring to David's complaint about the original patch (which would have removed the 'sit0' alias without providing any backward compatibility). The way forward suggested by Arnd takes care of that problem, if I am following along correctly (which is sometimes in question, see the thread :) -- or am I still confused?

jake

Capabilities for loading network modules

Posted Mar 5, 2011 17:00 UTC (Sat) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

But Miller's complaint is more substantial, as anything that used to do "ifconfig sit0", for example, will no longer work.
That's not the problem - the networking core and these modules will be changed at the same time to use the 'netdev-' prefix. The problem is with module aliases which some distributions (and individual sysadmins) configured as a way of auto-loading net drivers before the introduction of udev, and which they may still rely on some cases. These of course will not have the 'netdev-' prefix.
That line from the article was referring to David's complaint about the original patch (which would have removed the 'sit0' alias without providing any backward compatibility). The way forward suggested by Arnd takes care of that problem, if I am following along correctly (which is sometimes in question, see the thread :) -- or am I still confused?

No-one proposed removing those static aliases. The first actual patch was posted after I made a (hopefully comprehensive) list of the static aliases, and it updated all those aliases.