I’m glad to announce the second version of kmod. I’m sorry for not sending the first version to the mailing lists. Now I’m both writing it here and sending to the mailing list.
I thank very much the feedback received for the first version and that now Jon Masters, the maintainer of module-init-tools, is helping us with kmod and already announced that kmod will replace module-init-tools in future.
I’d like to especially thank Tom Gundersen, Dave Reisner, Marco d’Itri, Jon Masters, Luis Strano, Jan Engelhardt and Kay Sievers who have been extensively testing kmod and helping with compatibility with previous tools. Right now kmod is tested in i686, x86_64, sparcv9, powepc64, s390 and ARM. More testers are greatly appreciated, especially for architectures not mentioned here.
News for this version are (copying from NEWS file):
Some bugs fixed: the worst of them was with an infinite loop when an alias matched more than one module.
- New APIs in libkmod to: - Get soft dependencies - Get info from module files parsing ELF - Get modversions from files parsing ELF
- Support to load gzipped kernel modules: kmod can be compiled with support to gzipped modules by giving the —enable-zlib flag
- Support to forcefully load modules, both vermagic and modversion
- Support to force and nowait removal flags
- Configuration files are parsed in the same order as modprobe: files are sorted alphabetically (independently of their dir) and files with the same name obey a precedence order
- New tool: kmod-modinfo
- kmod-modprobe gained several features to be a 1:1 replacement for modprobe. The only missing things are the options ‘—showconfig’ and ‘-t / -l’. These last ones have been deprecated long ago and they will be removed from modprobe. A lot of effort has been put on kmod-modprobe to ensure it maintains compabitility with modprobe.
- linux-modules@vger.kernel.org became the official mailing list for kmod
For the next version, we plan to migrate our git repository to kernel.org. Meanwhile, git repository can be found at http://git.profusion.mobi/cgit.cgi/kmod.git/ and packages at http://packages.profusion.mobi/kmod/