Re: Hardwired drivers are going away?

Dr. Kelsey Hudson
2002-02-09T00:19:29Z

This bothers me. I prefer building a monolithic kernel with only a few
drivers compiled as modules (e.g. those drivers which are under active
development and are upgraded often). I believe firmly that certain drivers
should be part of the monolithic kernel.... either way, i'm not about to
debate it. i'd just like to know exactly why this is being done, and to
lodge an objection against it.

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> > For 2.5 if things go to plan there will be no such thing as a "compiled in"
> > driver. They simply are not needed with initramfs holding what were once the
> > "compiled in" modules.
>
> This is something of a bombshell. Not necessarily a bad one, but...
>
> Alan, do you have *any* *freakin'* *idea* how much more complicated
> the CML2 deduction engine had to be because the basic logical entity
> was a tristate rather than a bool? If this plan goes through, I'm
> going to be able to drop out at least 20% of the code, with most of
> that 20% being in the nasty complicated bits where the maintainability
> improvement will be greatest. And I can get rid of the nasty "vitality"
> flag, which probably the worst wart on the language.
>
> Yowza...so how soon is this supposed to happen?
>

--
Kelsey Hudson khudson@ctica.com
Software Engineer
Compendium Technologies, Inc (619) 725-0771
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