Built-in modules review

[Chase Douglas]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Scott James Remnant <scott at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 15:12 -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> The HID drivers are loaded by hardware.
>
> Anything you can do "modinfo foo | grep alias" with and see something
> with wildcards will be autoloaded in userspace.

True, but the module loading mechanism isn't the real issue here. It's
whether we want to load fuse dynamically or not. The HID module issue
shows us that there are issues with compiling such a module into the
kernel. We can figure out the loading mechanism later if we decide to
pull it out of the kernel.

-- Chase