Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org writes:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 11:54:50 -0700 Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@suse.de wrote:
This is no longer needed by any userspace tools, so it's safe to remove.
Makes my FC6 test box not boot - can't find /dev/root. Then when I go back to plain old mainline (2.6.35-rc5) and run `make oldconfig', the .config change sticks:
@@ -106,8 +106,7 @@ CONFIG_LOG_BUF_SHIFT=17 CONFIG_HAVE_UNSTABLE_SCHED_CLOCK=y # CONFIG_CGROUPS is not set -CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=y -CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2=y +# CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 is not set CONFIG_RELAY=y CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y # CONFIG_UTS_NS is not set
and the box still won't boot.
The reason FC6 doesn't boot is there is a userspace tool I believe in the initrd that cares about symlinks when it should not.
What is more interesting is that currently there is a bug in 2.6.35-rc5 where rmmod <netdriver> modprobe <netdriver> will in fact fail. There was an inadvertent regression and no one has noticed or complained. I spotted it by code review just a little bit ago and I haven't had a chance to write and test the fix yet.
If the code is going to start bitrotting and no one is going to notice or care simply removing the code instead of subjecting users to weird unexpected breakage seems like a responsible thing to do.
Eric