Re: tlug: Kernel rebuild problem

[Chris Sekiya <chris@example.com>]

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> <ATTADUDE FLAME=LOW>
> Assume, hypothetically, that there was a good reason for the activity
> that Scott is gainfully employed to do:  producing distributions for
> sale and installation on a wide variety of hardware.
> </ATTADUDE>

*laugh* I'm going a bit too far, aren't I?  My opinion of modules is from
a technical standpoint -- I don't really care what distro people do,
unless they botch it and I have to fix the problems on our machines. 

IIRC, the whole module concept was thought up by Peter MacDonald (anyone
know what happened to him?).  The idea was to have kernel drivers that
didn't need to be rebuilt each time the kernel was upgraded.  In practice,
though, the ABI transmogrified so swiftly that a module rebuild would be
necessary anyway.

Further, each module eats up at least one complete page per.  Rather
wasteful for a 436-byte driver.

Lastly, modules make for weakened system security.  I've seen a number of
machines with insmod suid root for convenience.

-- Chris

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