module-init-tools v3.6 released

[Phil Knirsch]

Jon Masters wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 18:19 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
>> On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 03:47 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
>>
>>> I'm considering pushing an update to F-9 since v3.5+ is so much faster
>>> than previous releases - and it impacts boot time, but I have to admit
>>> that I was more concerned about F10 and rawhide until now.
>> Oh, there's a slight issue with the handling of modules.order still for
>> the binary tries in newer module-init-tools. This might manifest in a
>> switch of e.g. module used in initrd for storage devices with multiple
>> modaliases.
> 
> So...one question...
> 
> We now have binary versions of files like "modules.dep", "modules.alias"
> and "modules.symbols". These end in ".bin" and *augment* but do not
> replace the textual versions of these files. If we find the binary
> files, we are *much* faster at loading modules - boot overhead is e.g.
> under one second.
> 
> But we need to be able to make changes to these binary files in order to
> add ordering support, and also just for the future. Our plan is to
> freeze the old text file format (the "last" change will be the one made
> recently in which modules.dep can now have relative paths to save space)
> and to fallback to it whenever the binary format changes and modprobe
> finds older binary files.
> 
> This works fine, but means that, if we upgrade module-init-tools and
> there is a binary format change, then the system will be "slow" booting
> before depmod has been re-run again. I'm thinking about just doing a
> "depmod -a" on upgrade in such cases in the future...is there a problem
> with that idea?
> 
> Jon.
> 

Imho in case of an update of module-init-tools that sounds absolutely 
reasonable. Users are much more likely to reboot their machines then get 
updates for module-init-tools, so the little overhead introduced with 
running depmod -a during an update should in general be significantly 
lower than the gains in subsequent bootups.

Jusy my $0.02.

Regards, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
Team Lead Core Services      | Fax.:  +49-711-96437-111
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