Re: [PATCH] vt: Add enable module parameter

[Jocelyn Falempe <jfalempe@redhat.com>]

On 26/01/2026 11:30, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 11:20:21AM +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 10:43:35AM +0100, Jocelyn Falempe wrote:
>>> On 26/01/2026 10:33, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 10:21:50AM +0100, Jocelyn Falempe wrote:
>>>>> This allows to build the kernel with CONFIG_VT enabled, and choose
>>>>> on the kernel command line to enable it or not.
>>>>
>>>> This says what is happening, but not why?
>>>>
>>>>> Add vt.enable=1 to force enable, or vt.enable=0 to force disable.
>>>>
>>>> Why are we using a 1990's technology for a new feature?  What is this
>>>> going to allow to have happen?  Who needs/wants this?  Who will use it?
>>>> For what?
>>>
>>> The goal is to ease the transition to disable CONFIG_VT.
>>>
>>> So if this is merged, you can boot without VT on any Linux distribution,
>>> without rebuilding the kernel.
>>
>> But that's a distro-specific thing, the distro should be enabling or
>> disabling the option as it needs, it should not be a user-configurable
>> boot-time selection option as userspace depends entirely on this either
>> being there or not.  Why would you have a kernel with both options but
>> userspace without that?
> 
> And to follow-up on this, if a distro wanted to support this, why not
> just provide 2 different kernel images?  One with this enabled and one
> without?  It's up to the distro to support such a thing, not the kernel
> community, right?

That's clearly not an option, they will prefer to keep VT enabled 
forever than adding yet another kernel package. And for distributions 
that already have kernel and kernel-rt, that means maintaining 4 kernels 
for all combination.

> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h
>