On 10 August 2011 18:53, Tom Gundersen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Pierre Schmitz <[email protected]> wrote: >> I just wondered why I had ipx and appletalk modules loaded. After some >> tests I figured out that simply running ifconfig triggers the kernel to >> load them. This does not happen with an older kernel; e.g. our lts >> package. Any ideas about that? It might not break anything but it is >> strange anyway. We might also rethink if supporting these ancient >> protocols in kernel and user space tool is still needed. > > Doing a quick "git log v2.6.32..v3.0 drivers/net/appletalk > net/appletalk" did not reveal any changes to autoloading of the > appletalk module (all I saw was BKL removal and minor > bugfixes/cleanups). If the module is in our kernel package, and the > admin has not blacklisted it, I suppose the correct behavior _is_ to > autoload it when something might need it (such as ifconfig). > > It almost certainly can be disabled in the kernel though, it was at > some point moved to staging, with the justification: > > For all I know, Appletalk is dead, the only reasonable > use right now would be nostalgia, and that can be served > well enough by old kernels. The code is largely not > in a bad shape, but it still uses the big kernel lock, > and nobody seems motivated to change that. > > FWIW, the last release of MacOS that supported Appletalk > was MacOS X 10.5, made in 2007, and it has been abandoned > by Apple with 10.6. Using TCP/IP instead of Appletalk has > been supported since MacOS 7.6, which was released in > 1997 and is able to run on most of the legacy hardware. > > This was later reverted, but not for any good reason, just because they could: > > > This reverts commit a6238f21736af3f47bdebf3895f477f5f23f1af9 > > Appletalk got some patches to fix up the BLK usage in it in the > network tree, so this removal isn't needed. > > > > Similarly, I was not able to figure out why IPX is suddenly loaded. > However, there was no sign of this ever being deprecated. I suppose > the correct thing to do if you don't want to use it is to blacklist > it. (Or we could remove that to if people think it is not used any > more, I really don't know).
I'd just remove these from the kernel itself :) People can always modprobe, and it's not like these modules were expected to have loaded on prior occasions. -- GPG/PGP ID: 8AADBB10
