Do I need hotplug and coldplug now that I have netlink ?

javeree · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 453

I was looking in the rc scripts and read the udev addon start . It states that as of kernelversion 2.6.15, /sbin/hotplug is not used anymore, but that the netlinking mechanism is used instead. From googling, I only understood that netlink is a kind of communication mechanism that cantalk directly to udev through the /sys tree. The question is: now that I have 2.6.15 running, can I simply remove hotplug and coldplug, and only stick with udev ? or are these two ebuilds still necessary to get the coldplug/hotplugbehaviour ?

mr_koz · n00b Joined: 03 Mar 2005 Posts: 37 Location: New Zealand

My understanding is that udev handles devices like block devices and pci cards that are loaded at boot and cold/hotplug handles devices that change or are added after boot like USB memory sticks or keyboard/mouse etc.
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nixnut · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:37 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
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javeree_work · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2005 Posts: 84

Yes, that was my understanding too. However, I understood that hotplug was mainly a tool that could receive kernel events and then do something with it. It can be extended to do such things like opening a filemanager when a usb stick is received, starting a script to copy pictures from a camera, ...

However, in it's most basic setting, all it does in my understanding is pass the event on to udev, that can then use the information to create new /dev nodes. Actually, also udev can be extended to run specific scripts when a new dev node is created.

Therefore, my thinking was that unless one uses hotplug for something fancy, it would not be needed anymore if sending events from the kernel to udev is replaced by this 'netlink' mechanism.

My problem mainly is that I can't find any decent explanation on this new mechanism. Googling turned up either some ubscure conversations between kernel developers, or pages concerning networking.

mallchin · Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 1:56 pm Post subject:

This might be useful.
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javeree_work · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2005 Posts: 84

What an excellent explanation !!!

I'll first check if I have any custom hotplug or coldplug script running (I don't think so, but better check for sure), and then it's `emerge -C hotplug coldplug` !

skion · Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:10 am Post subject:

Yeah, that was very usefull, thanks!
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