Re: Automagic command loading

[Tomas Ebenlendr]

Ok, I think that common opinion is that autocmd.lst is better. So I'll
write autogenerating it and reading it e.g. in autocmd.mod.

I also try to figure out the slow point in this solution.

But I have folowing questions:

    1.) Should I throw away current implementation, or should there be
    a module with this implementation (e.g. autocmd_elf.mod).

    2.) I think, that having information about supported commands in
    module is not bad. I can write tool, to read it (and generate
    autocmd.lst from this information). Advantage will be following:
    User1 compiles his own module and sends it to User2. User2 will copy
    the module on proper location and run:
        grub-mod-read-cmds the_module.mod >> autocmd.lst    

> My intuition is that this is not a good solution. So I think of another 
> example.
> 
> The user does not like the behavior of, say, ls. So he writes his own 
> module for an exhanced version of ls. Then, which does GRUB load?
> 
> I do not like this undeterministic behavior. You may think that the user 
> can simply remove the original module and add his own. This is true, 
> but I don't think this is a clean way.
> 
> One more example. Suppose that GRUB supports 100 commands and 100 
> filesystems. Probably the overhead of loading all modules would be 
> negligible on Pentium4, but isn't it significant on 486? We should not 
> forget that some people still use very old computers.
> 
> I don't see any serious disadvantage in autocmd.lst. Generating this 
> file is as easy as embedding command names in modules. Editing this 
> file is not difficult at all for users who can write their own modules.
> 
> Generally speaking, text-based approaches are better than binary-based 
> approaches. For example, if the user wants to know what modules 
> contains a given command, he can just grep autocmd.lst instead of 
> reading the source code or using readelf.
> 
> BTW, I think it would be useful to investigate why loading all modules 
> takes 5 seconds on bochs. Even on bochs, I feel this is too much. There 
> might be a bug in the disk cache system. Tomas, could you look at the 
> cache efficiency when loading all modules? You can get this information 
> by the function grub_disk_cache_get_performance. To enable this 
> function, you need to change kern/disk.c, because I disable this by #if 
> 0 ... #endif.
> 
> Okuji
> 
> 
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-- 
                                 Tomas 'ebi' Ebenlendr
                                 http://get.to/ebik
                                 PF 2004.75133677393