From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757961Ab0JVRNc (ORCPT ); Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:13:32 -0400 Received: from mga03.intel.com ([143.182.124.21]:20249 "EHLO mga03.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753597Ab0JVRNc (ORCPT ); Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:13:32 -0400 X-ExtLoop1: 1 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.58,224,1286175600"; d="scan'208";a="339348797" Message-ID: <4CC1C63A.2040405@linux.intel.com> Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:13:30 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100921 Fedora/3.1.4-1.fc13 Thunderbird/3.1.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk CC: Jan Beulich , jeremy@goop.org, fujita.tomonori@lab.ntt.co.jp, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Modularizing IOMMUs (devel/iommu-0.4) References: <20101020202006.GA30096@dumpdata.com> <4CC15EE9020000780001E8B5@vpn.id2.novell.com> <20101022135439.GA23030@dumpdata.com> In-Reply-To: <20101022135439.GA23030@dumpdata.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 10/22/2010 06:54 AM, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote: > It does sound like the right option. 12 years ago it was suggested, > so.. how come nobody worked on it in the past? Were there some epic battles? No, quite the opposite... deafening silence. However, 12 years ago the module infrastructure looked very different than it does today, with large chunks implemented in user space. These days the module infrastructure is almost entirely in the kernel, which should make it a lot easier to implement. I thus suspect that it was just too hard when it was first proposed, and then got forgotten about. -hpa