Built-in modules review

[Chase Douglas]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Andy Whitcroft <apw at canonical.com> wrote:
> ATA Drivers: we have the majority of the PATA and SATA drivers built in.
> We already have reported issues with the PATA drivers where blacklisting
> could be used as a work around if they were not built in.  We are also
> exposing users to some level of risk including all these drivers which
> are not used.  In testing on the reference platform I did see a minor
> but measurable performance hit to modularising the SATA driver there.
> As we are moving to SATA over time I would propose we pull out all of
> the PATA drivers and build in only the 2 or 3 most common SATA drivers.

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for including some, but not
all, of the SATA drivers. If the drivers are mature, and we don't have
or foresee any issues with particular drivers, then why modularize
them? The main reason I see for modularization is if there's active
and useful development versions that people need to fix individual
issues and/or add features. I can see that being the case for
something like HID drivers, but most, if not all, SATA drivers should
be mature in both stability and features at this point, right?

-- Chase