Re: [lm-sensors] [patch 2.6.27-rc7] i2c: smbalert# support

[David Brownell <david-b-yBeKhBN/0LDR7s880joybQ@public.gmane.org>]

On Thursday 20 November 2008, Trent Piepho wrote:
> >
> > Did you actually check the size increase? struct i2c_driver is added
> > one pointer, so 4 or 8 bytes, hardly worth mentioning. struct
> > i2c_adapter is added 72 bytes on x86-64, to 1360 bytes initially so an
> > increase of less than 6%. Is this really such a big issue? I doubt it.
> > You don't have that many i2c_adapters registered on any given system
> > for it to really matter, methinks.
> 
> Except every other subsystem in the kernel does the same thing.  Each release
> of 2.6 is significantly more bloated than the last and this is how it happens. 
> One "it's not that much wasted" change at a time.

I do recall the "4 MByte performance problem" morphing into the "8 MByte"
problem, and then into the "16 MByte" version then "32 MByte" -- for UNIX
workstations, including GUI.  Today's handhelds are more powerful than
those!  And the embedded boards I get lately have 128 MB of RAM.

The real counter-argument is that memory isn't *that* tight, especially
since the hardware capacity is growing.


That said, maybe you have a patch to propose which would address the
problem of how to *cleanly* make this infrastructure optional?

- Dave