de-modularising for the win!

[Kyle McMartin]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 01:34:33AM -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 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.
> 

if a user is rebuilding their libata subsystem and replacing the
modules, or replacing their alsa modules, or whatnot, they've already
voided the "i'd like to help you" implied contract in open source, so
they should just go run and support their own kernel.

every patch in the fedora kernel has this implicit "i take
responsibility if this breaks" property. 

of course, we're talking about /fedora/ here, not rhel. obviously the
support reqiurements are vastly different for rhel.