Linux To Introduce The Ability To Set The Hostname Before Userspace Starts

[Retramon]

No, being bothered by the default hostname before userspace has time to change it is the niche usecase. Userspace sets the hostname very early on, the kernel-set hostname is almost always inconsequential.

It probably only comes up for embedded with a minimalist boot process, but those also very likely compile their own kernel, and can change the hostname there.

There are many reasons to comple your own kernel, setting the hostname is probably never the main reason.

The fact that this pretty simple feature is only being implemented now is a sign of how few people have a use for it.

At the beginning of reading this article I was mixing it with configuring a custom hostname early when installing a fresh linux distro right there in the installer instead of later after logging, that too would make sense but that's another thing that might already be a thing in some distros (Tho I don't remember seeing this option in Fedora WS / OpenSuse T / Arch Linux )

Now that I understand, this definitely makes a lot of sense, whatever the usecase or not, it just happens to have not been there so much, I don't understand the resistance or the benefit of pointing out the popularity aspect, if something makes sense from design, technical and sort of philosophical point of view that change is surely more welcome than not, why would such a fundamental parameter not be set up before userspace on purpose, yes it might be a niche, allright, shouldn't it have been the default behavior since the beginning? I think so.

[dragon321]

so important that nobody needed that in 30 years, servers I have seen usually used UUID, WWN and usually not mdadm ;-)

There were other solutions (like setting hostname during kernel compile) but this solution is more convenient. Also it seems that somebody needed that and implemented that for Linux kernel.

[rene]

There were other solutions (like setting hostname during kernel compile) but this solution is more convenient. Also it seems that somebody needed that and implemented that for Linux kernel.

yeah, well, and then multiply that with 10.000 and wonder why we have so many random, mostly unused and at times bizarre options and code in the Linux kernel ;-) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sinepgib]

yeah, well, and then multiply that with 10.000 and wonder why we have so many random, mostly unused and at times bizarre options and code in the Linux kernel ;-) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So who gets to pick which features are valid to implement? That's more of a social and governance problem than a technical one.
Linux got where it is (which IMO is a good place) because the only gatekeeping for patches was about quality, and it's otherwise really open to improvements.
I personally see the setting at build time as less useful than the command line, and I'm surprised they went for that instead for so long. Maybe it could be removed later on?

[mdedetrich]

To what?
Stable trees? unlikely.
Your distribution's kernel? Pretty much up to them.

Actually I could see this being backported, mainly because a lot of LTS distro's are used in datacenters and they would find this functionality very useful.