de-modularising for the win!

Arjan van de Ven arjan at infradead.org
Tue Sep 30 08:34:33 UTC 2008


On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:24:22 -0400
Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 13:22 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 04:09:57PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> > 
> > > I advocate extreme caution before just willy-nilly building
> > > everything into the kernel. Although this might seem like a great
> > > idea from the point of view of speeding up boot, there is also
> > > the pesky issue of users wanting the choice to decide which
> > > modules get loaded, and more importantly, wanting to override
> > > those modules with their own. To do this truly "right" we'll need
> > > to do rebinding of drivers in kernel. That's not always going to
> > > be easily possible after it's in use.
> > 
> > Linux is not about choice.
> 
> Well, it should be wherever possible :)
> 

for certain types of choices the answer is going to be "oh now you need
to compile your own kernel"; there's just too many config options for
that not to be the case.
Of course for the normal, common scenarios that's not the right answer,
but "I would like to replace core component FOO" it's perfectly fine.

Users don't replace their AHCI driver much (and if they do, even today,
they're likely to just build their own whole kernel, or use a rawhide
kernel rpm)

In the RHEL world the rules are a bit different due to the really long
release cycles (even for hw support updates), but on Fedora.... if you
are capable of backporting a driver you can also build your own kernel
or use an rpm provided.

-- 
Arjan van de Ven 	Intel Open Source Technology Centre
For development, discussion and tips for power savings, 
visit http://www.lesswatts.org




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