On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 02:12:29PM +1300, Tom Eastman wrote: > What do people think? Does it seem like a good idea? Or is it just > immensely stupid? > > Tom
Modules are handy, but the way I figure it, things like modules and initrd's are a pain to do by hand, and mostly exist to meet the needs of generic distributions and LiveCD's and the like. If you don't blow away your source tree after you compile a kernel, adding an extra option or two and compiling/linking can literally take a few seconds. Of course, you still have to reboot. I'd suggest trying it. I did, and that's pretty much the conclusion I came to. There would be much less need for modules and initrd's (obviously, they are nicer and more flexible in many situations, I don't mean to imply that they're useless otherwise) if people were simply savvy enough to compile a kernel, but you're already over that hurdle, so there's no reason to pretend that you can't easily compile a new kernel if you stroll home with a piece of hardware from Best Buy. If you're going to load a module every single time you boot your machine, and you're not planning on copying the kernel across multiple machines, and there's no reason to unload the module (parallel port, filesystems of always-mounted partitions, a few other things), there's no real *reason* to modularize them, except for the fun of it. There is something to be said for that, of course! ;) I modularalize next-to-nothing; it feels slightly less maintainable for my home machine. 768 MB of RAM... and I can save 2k by compiling the loopback filesystem as a module and only loading it when I need it, but it will make my configuration more complicated, or use an extra minute of my time? .. forget it. =) -- Adam Fabian ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- [email protected] mailing list
