Re: Hardwired drivers are going away?

Alexander Viro
2002-01-14T19:30:26Z

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, David Lang wrote:

> I can see a couple reasons for building a kernel without useing modules.
>
> 1. security, if you don't need any modules you can disable modules entirly
> and then it's impossible to add a module without patching the kernel first
> (the module load system calls aren't there)

Oh, please... Give me permissions sufficient to make these syscalls
and in a couple of minutes your kernel will be replaced with ELIZA.
As a bonus - ELIZA running under TOPS-10 on PDP-10 emulator. And talking
to PARRY.

Anyway, it's trivial to disable said system calls just before doing
execve("/sbin/init",...). It won't buy you any security, but if you
insist...

> 2. speed, there was a discussion a few weeks ago pointing out that there
> is some overhead for useing modules (far calls need to be used just in
> case becouse the system can't know where the module will be located IIRC)

_That_ has to be addressed - regardless of anything else, if that suckitude
can be fixed it should be.

> 3. simplicity in building kernels for other machines. with a monolithic
> kernel you have one file to move (and a bootloader to run) with modules
> you have to move quite a few more files.

FVO"quite a few" equal to 2. Kernel and initramfs.cpio.gz