> Sure it could, but it would mean the kernel is sitting on an average of 6 MB of unusable memory. It would also mean that unloaded modules would create holes in that memory which would have to be managed.
On my Fedora38 desktop:
$ lsmod | awk '{ bytes += $2 } END {print bytes/(1024*1024)}'
21.0859
Lots more than 6MB memory already essentially pinned by loaded modules.
$ head -3 /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 65507344 kB
MemFree: 56762336 kB
MemAvailable: 63358552 kB
Pinning 20 or so Mbytes isn't going to make a dent in that free memory.
Managing the holes for unloading/reloading modules adds some complexity ... but shouldn't be awful.
If this code managed at finer granularity than "page", it would save some memory.
$ lsmod | wc -l
123
All those modules rounding text/data up to 4K boundaries is wasting a bunch of it.
-Tony
