Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote: > This may sound like a stupid question, but why are you compiling the > modules statically? > > I mean, it sounds to me like the perfect way to do what you want is to > compile the modules dynamically (you can store them in a an in kernel > initramfs if you want to keep them attached to the kernel binary for > ease of maintenance) and simply call a script that calls modprobe when > it's OK to load them? I'm not positive, but I think we link them statically for size and time reasons. Statically linking the modules means we can eliminate the module load code from the kernel, and also save ourselves the ELF sections (in each module) which hold relocation information, etc. Also, insmod-ing (or modprobe-ing) the modules takes extra time overhead for the symbol relocation step. Since this would be deferred in our case, this might not be a big deal, but it does add to the total length of time required to boot. > Sounds a hell of lot simpler to me... Our patch isn't that big or complicated now. I just didn't like the ioctl(). Replacing the ioctl with some other lightweight mechanism shouldn't complicate the code too much. I'm not sure requiring a shell interpreter (to run the script) a script, a program (modprobe) and a whole new set of memory operations (to handle the initramfs), is simpler than a single ioctl. (It might be, in the non-embedded case, where the presence of these things is taken for granted.) -- Tim ============================= Tim Bird Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America ============================= -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
