On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Shawn wrote:

> Also, which is better:  A kernel with loadable modules, or a kernel
> with as few of modules as possible but kernel subsets enabled for
> specific devices?  I'm thinking it's the second one, but am unsure.

personally i enable as many modules as i can except that is needed to boot 
the system (devfs, ext3, fb and the like)

yes a monolithic kernel is smaller, but who cares?
at most its maybe 50 megs, thats $.5 in todays harddrive prices.

the advantage of modularized kernels far outweighs the size or the kernel.

lets say your intel eepro network card dies. you simply swap it out for 
whatever else you have in your parts-bin

on my laptop i have every concievable USB/pcmcia/parport module compiled, 
why? because you never know when you will come across itemX that you want 
to work with.

also another advantage of modularized kernels is that you can unload and 
reload the module to add support for hotadded items, such as scsi devices. 
of course this does not work if you want to reload oyur adaptec drivers 
while the bootdevice is on said adaptor.

-- 
Munir Nassar
RedConcepts.NET
http://redconcepts.net/

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