Re: Loading a module multtiple times

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

In message <20030430140557.12e13f1a.rddunlap@osdl.org> you write:
> 
> Hi Rusty-
> 
> I was looking into a bug in /proc/net/dev truncated output.
> /proc/net/dev lists {if (!buggy)} all loaded network interfaces.
> 
> To get a large number of network interfaces, Christian (below)
> told me to copy driver/net/dummy.o to several different file names
> and then insmod them.  It seems to have worked for him, and it works
> that way in 2.4.recent, but it's not working for me.  See error
> messages below.
> 
> Which way is expected behavior?
> What should be the expected behavior?
> or am I just seeing bugs (failures) that noone else sees?

No, it's a 2.5 thing: modules know their own name.  This is because
(1) the names are used to set new-style boot parameters, (2) needing
to insert two modules is usually wrong, since how would that work if
the module was built-in?

It also opens us up to the possibility of a list of built-in modules,
if we wanted to.

However, the -o option to modprobe replaces the module name (by
hacking the elf object, yes), because programmers are basically lazy,
and multiple modules are useful for testing.

So, you want:
	for i in `seq 1 100`; do modprobe -o dummy$i dummy; done

This works on 2.4 as well.  Note that insmod doesn't support -o, being
a trivial program by design.

> It seems like not supporting this is likely to cause some problems.

Yes.  Removing any feature causes problems 8(.  But adding every
feature is usually worse.

Hope this clarifies?
Rusty.
--
  Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell.