Why is hotplug disabled when loading network modules

[Bill Nottingham]

Jean-Rene Cormier (jean-rene.cormier at cipanb.ca) said: 
> Hi, I have a laptop with an Intel Pro Wireless 2100 card and I'm using
> the ipw2100 driver which loads the firmware through hotplug and was
> wondering why the firmware wasn't getting loaded at boot time. Someone
> on the IPW2100-devel list mentioned that hotplug was getting disabled in
> the is_available function in
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions and looking at that
> file I can see that I have these lines which do disable it:
> 
>     HOTPLUG=`cat /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug`
>     echo "/bin/true" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
>     modprobe $1 > /dev/null 2>&1 || {
>       echo "$HOTPLUG" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
>       return 1
>     }
>     echo "$HOTPLUG"  > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
> 
> Why is hotplug disabled when loading the module? And what should be the
> "proper way" of loading the firmware?

It's disabled because otherwise interfaces will be popping up at random.
Unfortunately, there's not a way to disable specific *parts* of hotplug.

Bill