de-modularising for the win!

[Bill Nottingham]

Chris Snook (csnook at redhat.com) said: 
>> See various and sundry plumber's conf discussions.
>
> Links please?

Not sure where things are being posted. Summary:

- modules are wasteful (you lose a good chunk of code size savings in
  page round up)
- modules are slow (well, modprobe is)
- for the modules that are used by 90% of machines, what's the point
  of having them static?
- killing the initrd for that general 90% case can be a big win


>> Comments? (The netfilter stuff needs further investigation.)
>
> -CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP=m
> +CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP=y
> -CONFIG_SCSI=m
> +CONFIG_SCSI=y
> -CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=m
> +CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=y
> -CONFIG_ATA_PIIX=m
> +CONFIG_ATA_PIIX=y
> -CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=m
> +CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=y
> -CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM=m
> +CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM=y
>
> If this is going to make it easier to do fancy things in the initrd, I'm 
> all for it.  If it's just a TLB thing, I don't think it's worth it.

Fancy things by not having the initrd.

> -CONFIG_MAC80211=m
> +CONFIG_MAC80211=y
> -CONFIG_IEEE80211=m
> +CONFIG_IEEE80211=y
>
> Won't this make it harder for people to test experimental wireless 
> drivers? Unless the vendors start opening specs, we're going to have a 
> perpetual need to play around in this area with each new hardware rev.

How so? There's one version shared among all the in-tree modules. If
you're developing the kernel, you're already rebuilding, so you can
do whatever.

> -CONFIG_SND=m
> +CONFIG_SND=y
> -CONFIG_SND_SEQUENCER=m
> +CONFIG_SND_SEQUENCER=y
> -CONFIG_SND_MIXER_OSS=m
> -CONFIG_SND_PCM_OSS=m
> +CONFIG_SND_MIXER_OSS=y
> +CONFIG_SND_PCM_OSS=y
> -CONFIG_SND_RTCTIMER=m
> +CONFIG_SND_RTCTIMER=y
> -CONFIG_SND_HDA_INTEL=m
> +CONFIG_SND_HDA_INTEL=y
> -CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0=m
> +CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0=y
>
> For the love of god, no.  We have lots of sound problems that require 
> modprobe magic to troubleshoot and work around. 

Fix the $*@* driver, then!

(FWIW, the only sound problems I've seen recently is that the volume
restore scripts got broken.)

> This will require people 
> to rebuild their kernel just to test sound fixes, which will scare away 
> an awful lot of testers and inconvenience the rest.

How often are we shipping random source patches to Fedora users, who
would have to install kernel-devel and kernel-source anyway, causing
them to download just as much data as a new test kernel?

Bill