de-modularising for the win!

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 12:13 -0700, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> See various and sundry plumber's conf discussions.
> 
> Comments? (The netfilter stuff needs further investigation.)

I'm ok with all of these specific config changes, but I'd like to repeat
what I said in Kyle's session about demodularising in general.

I advocate extreme caution before just willy-nilly building everything
into the kernel. Although this might seem like a great idea from the
point of view of speeding up boot, there is also the pesky issue of
users wanting the choice to decide which modules get loaded, and more
importantly, wanting to override those modules with their own. To do
this truly "right" we'll need to do rebinding of drivers in kernel.
That's not always going to be easily possible after it's in use.

And while we might not love binary drivers, note that it is the user's
choice to make. If they want to load proprietary (or just out of tree
drivers) then we should not go out of our way to intentionally make this
difficult for them. i.e. let's no go building in particular graphics
drivers for political reasons...I'm pre-empting discussion there :)

So, anyway, Bill's got a good base set of common options.

Jon.