[OpenAFS-devel] Solaris afs.rc file damage

[Russ Allbery]

Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> writes:

> Then the Linux kernel has indeed made system calls not dynamically
> loadable. This is a disappointing, but not unexpected event.  I think
> this event should at least motivate some thought to create a patch
> system similar to netfilter, that patches the kernel source according to
> the kernel version. Or at least instructions on how to add the AFS
> kernel code as a staticly linked module on linux. I don't think this is
> hard.  Netfilter does it and all sorts of non-kernel developers build
> patched kernels for netfilter updates.

Mostly, I think you're now on the right page.  However, there's still one
error here.  Statically linking OpenAFS does nothing to give us a system
call.

In order to add a system call in the regular, supported way, you have to
*patch the kernel*.  If you patch the kernel to add the system call, you
can then build OpenAFS dynamically and works fine.  The two operations are
entirely independent.  Statically building the kernel module doesn't have
any interaction with the system call table.

There's no real reason to ever build OpenAFS statically on Linux that I
can think of, particularly now that nearly every distribution uses initrd
and the like for dynamically loading modules during the initial boot.
It's easier to deal with dynamically.  If we have to patch OpenAFS to add
a system call, best to just do that and still load the module dynamically.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>