[klibc] klibc and what's the next step?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Olaf Hering wrote:
>>> It's a proposal, and I personally think it makes sense.  If done, it is 
>>> obviously very important that it doesn't change the overall operation of 
>>> the system.
>> I think you can have that today, parted uses BLKPG to add and remoe
>> things. No idea what the benefit would be, but thats not relavant for
>> kinit or no kinit.
> 
> The notion that the kernel itself should do no partition parsing at all 
> was advocated by Andries Brouwer. I violently disagree. Anything that the 
> lack of which makes a normal system basically unusable should go into the 
> kernel.
> 

Does that mean "in kernel space", "in the kernel distribution" or "in 
memory completely under the control by the kernel?"  That is really what 
this is about.

There could be a klibc-build binary in rootfs, build at the time the 
kernel was built, that can be invoked by the kernel in parallel with 
/sbin/hotplug.

> Yes, the kernel rules are heuristics, but so would inevitably any 
> user-level rules be too, so I don't want to move partition detection to 
> initrd or similar.

The whole point of putting klibc in the kernel tree is so we can do this 
kind of stuff without breaking the stock kernel build as a 
self-contained entity.  Without that objective, Olaf is right that it is 
not necessary.

	-hpa