[Preston] Building Modular Kernels

[James Green]

Hiya,

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 01:19:14PM +0000, Andrew King wrote:
> If you have plenty of memory (eg 128MB+), is there any point in having a 
> modular kernel over just compiling everything straight in?  I know that 
> modules allow memory to be saved when those parts of the kernel aren't 
> needed, but isn't that just as in saving a bit of kernel code from being 
> loaded, which is surely just a couple of megs at the most?  I'm planning 
> on just switching back to compiling everything straight in for a while 
> in the interests of making life easier, but just wondering if there's 
> any major reason that we're supposed to use modules for that I've forgot.

I don't compile anything as modules, and never have, apart from stuff
like CIPE, lm-sensors and the nvidia drivers, which obviously aren't
available to compile into the kernel. I've never seen the point, for the
reasons you give, and it Works For Me(tm).

On the other hand, I've seen it argued that it's worth compiling support
for lots of different hardware you aren't currently using as modules, so
that in the event of replacing a piece of hardware, you can just plug it
in and go without a recompile -- usually these people are referring to
network cards. Personally I'm not convinced that's so worthwhile.

Cheers,

James.
-- 
PGP fingerprint 3E85 0C7A FE11 42E9 A599 094D AE16 90F0 81AE 16FF, ID 81AE16FF
... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
		-- Mark Twain
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/preston/attachments/20040316/30d5d0ab/attachment.bin