[SWLUG] Hi all + final year uni project

[Tim Shapcott]

On Sat, 4 Oct 2003 justin at discordia.org.uk wrote:
 
> Sorry if i sound a bit negative, but wasnt this made pretty much
> redundant by kernel modules a long time ago? Its a pretty rare thing to
> want or need to do a custom kernel compile, especially for general
> purpose machines like a cybercafe or comuter lab.
> 
> With a modern distro the kernel comes with all of the
> drivers compiled as modules, and which ones to load are determined
> (usually automatically) at runtime.
> 
> Recompiling kernels i feel is now just for the specialist areas like
> embedded systems where you need to optimise on size as much as possible,
> and for the rare cases where you just cant get a specific driver or mod
> as part of the standard kernel and it needs kernel patches that cant
> just be compiled as extra modules, in which case the auto tool wouldnt
> really help anyway as it wouldnt know about the non-standard stuff.
> 

Hi Justin,

Thanks for your input. However, this is the project I chose to do, and I
committed myself to it last year. So, now I have to do it!

I appreciate what you said about the fact that modules make this
redundant, but there are a number of occasions where I have had to
recompile in order to get things to work correctly. I have a TV card in my
machine, and there is no way that a standard distro has the modules for
this already compiled, and I don't think my machine has ever powered
itself off properly with a standard kernel.

As for the non-standard hardware needing kernel patches, as long as the
auto tool knows about the hardware (i.e. it recognises its number as given
by lspci -n) then it can at least tell the user that a patch is needed, if
not locate and download the patch.

Cheers

Tim