de-modularising for the win!

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:33:14AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:

> Yay! So then one day we can look forward to everything being built in
> and a user wanting to build a webcam driver having to build their own
> kernel too. Then we'll really have won because that user - who can
> follow some straightforward instructions on a website showing them how
> to build a driver and install it - will give up and go use Ubuntu.

I don't think anyone's argued for building an entirely static kernel. 
Where there's a significant advantage to building something in (and 
Arjan has shown that there is), we should do it. If there isn't, we 
shouldn't. I really don't think there's any reason the vast majority of 
our users would want to replace their AHCI driver, and the -hda one 
needs solving in some way other than "Download and rebuild ALSA" anyway.

> Just because we can build our own kernels with whatever patches does not
> mean that all users who want to add a driver are capable of this.

If users are capable of following the documentation for building an out 
of tree module, they're capable of following the documentation 
describing how to produce a modified kernel. The ones who aren't are, 
I'm willing to bet, a smaller number than the users who would be 
attracted by increased boot speeds.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org