Built-in modules review

[Chase Douglas]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Scott James Remnant <scott at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 14:59 -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
>
>> The last time I worried about something like this was when I was
>> running gentoo a few years ago and you had to ensure that nvidia was
>> loaded before X started. There was some /etc file that was read at
>> boot time to load the modules listed within. Do we have anything like
>> that?
>>
> Yes.
>
> But the only difference between putting modules in that file, and
> building them into the kernel, is that it's slower to get them loaded
> when they're in that file.
>
> We deliberately set =y on every module we had in that file; that's how
> fuse is now built into the kernel.

This has unfortunately led us down the path of inflexibility in our
kernel though. For example, the HID drivers were compiled in
statically for Karmic, but there's active development going on
upstream. I (and others) wanted to hack around a little with an Apple
Magic Mouse and other multitouch devices and had to compile a new
kernel because the HID module was built in. Thus, we've pulled it back
out of the kernel for Lucid. IMHO it's a better tradeoff to load such
a module dynamically rather than compile it in statically.

-- Chase