Re: incremental static module addition to kernel

[Jon Masters <jcm redhat com>]

On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 09:12 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
> Harald Hoyer wrote:
> > Compiling these modules, which are loaded on nearly every PC, in the
> > kernel ...
> 
> How about letting the end system administrator add modules statically.
> Make a utility program which uncompresses a kernel, incrementally adds
> (loads, as /bin/ld) a list of modules, then re-compresses the modified
> kernel.  The original kernel needs a compiled-in ["meta-"]module
> to provide hooks for initialization of the added modules.

Meant to reply sooner, such is life, but I think this is a really bad
idea - it's what some of the other OSes out there have considered, but
it's not something that we should be doing IMO :)

You can't just add modules to the kernel in the manner that you
describe, though conceptually it is a bit like that. For built-in
modules, there is a module list with init functions called during
bringup, and with a bit of munging one could get the kernel image
"extensible" in this fashion...but it's not worth the effort.

Jon.