Re: getting rid of inter_module_xx

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 17:27 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sad, 2004-10-23 at 10:44, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > not at all.  Everything else in the kernel is compile-time depencies.
> > Just make the agp backend module mandatory if CONFIG_AGP is set, you'll
> > lose tons of complexity at a minimum amount of used memory, and as an
> > added benefit look like the rest of the kernel.
> 
> Thats completely stupid
> 
> CONFIG_AGP enables the building of AGP modules, it does not disable the
> ability to run that kernel on non AGP setups, or to use non AGP video
> cards.
> 
> The relationship is dynamic and you'd need to fix the various drivers
> that support both PCI and AGP mode by compiling them twice so you can
> load them with or without agp support.
> 
> Yuck yuck yuck. It would instead be much saner to fix the module loader
> to support weak symbols.

Well, we do support weak symbols, and we also support dynamic symbol
resolution using symbol_get (or symbol_request which probes for the
module if CONFIG_KMOD) and symbol_put.

It's just the inter_module* mechanism which I dislike.
Rusty.
-- 
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver -- Richard Braakman