Kernel Suggestions
Matthew J Brown (mjb@sophos.com)
Fri, 26 Apr 1996 17:33:41 +0100
John Taylor writes:
>
> I noticed several things that can save a few pages of memory in the kernel.
> The scsi cd-rom driver has support for multisessions cdroms. (I think there
> was also special support for several cdroms, which could be queried to if
> the user had these.) I edited this out of the driver and when I insmod'd my
> cdrom driver, lsmod reported it to be 1 page smaller. I also did the same
> with the floppy drive patch that is floating around. It supports only sizes
> of 360, 720, 1.2, and 1.44. When I insmod'd this it also saved 1 page of
> memory.
>
> Would it be possible for someone to have as the next question under "Support
> for scsi cdrom", a sub-question "Support for multisession cdroms" ? Also
> maybe the same type of thing could be done for under "Support for floppy
> drive". An even further optimization would be "Support for 3.5 inch" and
> "Support for 5.25 inch". I am not knowledgable enough to do this myself,
Removing support for multisession CDROMS is a Bad Idea, IMHO.
Especially with the increasing numbers of cd writers out there,
multisession is going to be increasingly common.
This would be like removing support for 720K floppies from a 3.5"
floppy drive, since "they're rarely used". Rarely, maybe, but they
are used, your hardware can read them, and it's not that smart to
remove support for them from the kernel; you don't want to have to
recompile to be able to read the things if someone gave you one with
important data on it. Not for one measly page of memory.
Removing kernel support for formats your hardware can't cope with is
less foolish, but it does complicate things a fair bit.
-Matt