When I first played around with Gentoo, I found this nifty application called “coldplug” which claimed it would load modules for my hardware and start them. “Awesome” said I as prior Linux distro’s I had used never had something like this. So I added it to my boot level and watched … it do nothing. Boy did I feel miffed :(
But wait … it had actually loaded my modules and started my network scripts in the background. Excellent- life was good :)
After I became more involved with baselayout I discovered that coldplug was starting things too early so we put some crazy fudges in place like not being able to add net scripts to the BOOT runlevel and other such trickery. Now coldplug has been moved into udev itself it’s starting even earlier, which forced us to radicaly rethink our coldplug handling and we think we’ve got it just right now.
You will now be informed which services will be initiated at boot if the service isn’t in the boot or default runlevels. Here’s the configuaration for it in /etc/conf.d/rc
RC_COLDPLUG=“yes|no” RC_HOTPLUG=“yes|no” RC_PLUG_SERVICES=“net.wlan !net.*”
Hopefully Greg KH can soon write a udev that can work off these variables so that udev won’t even coldplug or hotplug by itself which will finally shut up the moaners once and for all! 8)