Re: Hardwired drivers are going away?

Rusty Russell
2002-01-14T23:13:14Z

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002 14:09:16 -0500 (EST)
Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> wrote:
> Two technical obstacles:
> a) on some architecures modular code is slower (IIRC, the problem is
> with medium-range calls being faster than far ones and usable only in the
> kernel proper). We probaly want to leave a gap after the .text and remap
> .text of module in there - if I understand the problem that should be
> enough, but that's really a question to folks dealing with these ports (PPC64
> and Itanic?)

Sparc64 has a special allocator. PPC32 is not so lucky, and if the module
doesn't end up under 32MB we use trampolines (PLT in the ppc parlance).
PPC64 has similar issues.

> b) current differences between options parsing in case of built-in
> and modular drivers.

I have a patch for this, of course, but it's tied to my replacement module
loader:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rusty/patches/Module/param.patch.bz2

Cheers!
Rusty.
--
Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell.