Release Notes for Alpine 3.12.0

Notable changes

OpenRC now has a sane ordering of directories when loading kernel modules

Loading kernel modules during boot is done with the modules OpenRC service, which reads configuration files in certain locations and loads kernel modules with the modprobe utility from either busybox or util-linux.

Before the changes the files were loading in the following order, files in modules-load.d directories were decided by how the shell picked it by globbing.

1. /etc/modules
2. /etc/modules-load.d/*.conf
3. /run/modules-load.d/*.conf
4. /usr/lib/modules-load.d/*.conf
5. /lib/modules-load.d/*.conf

That means the changes that were done in /etc/modules or /etc/modules-load.d by the local administrator ended up being overridden by modules installed by packages in /usr/lib/modules-load.d and /lib/modules-load.d.

With the changes to the modules service the new ordering of directories is:

1. /lib/modules-load.d/*.conf
2. /usr/lib/modules-load.d/*.conf
3. /etc/modules
4. /etc/modules-load.d/*.conf
5. /run/modules-load.d/*.conf

Now admins can override files installed by packages (/lib/modules-load.d and /usr/lib/modules-load.d) by having files with the same name in /etc/modules-load.d, and both can be overridden by files in /run/modules-load.d.

Note that /etc/modules cannot be overridden and only exists because of historical precedent.