Understanding Linux Network Internals

User-Space Helpers

There are cases where it makes sense for the kernel to invoke a user-space application to handle events. Two such helpers are particularly important:

/sbin/modprobe

Invoked when the kernel needs to load a module. This helper is part of the module-init-tools package.

/sbin/hotplug

Invoked when the kernel detects that a new device has been plugged or unplugged from the system. Its main job is to load the correct device driver (module) based on the device identifier. Devices are identified by the bus they are plugged into (e.g., PCI) and the associated ID defined by the bus specification.^[†] This helper is part of the hotplug package.

The kernel provides a function named call_usermodehelper to execute such user-space helpers. The function allows the caller to pass the application a variable number of both arguments in arg[] and environment variables in env[]. For example, the first argument arg[0] tells call_usermodehelper what user-space helper to launch, and arg[1] can be used to tell the helper itself what configuration script to use (often called the user-space agent). We will see an example in the later section "/sbin/hotplug."

Figure 5-3 shows how two kernel routines, request_module and kobject_hotplug, invoke call_usermodehelper to invoke /sbin/modprobe and /sbin/hotplug, respectively. It also shows examples of how arg[] and envp[] are initialized in the two cases. The following subsections go into a little more detail on each of those two user-space helpers. ...