Re: modules problems

Andrew E. Mileski (aem@ott.hookup.net)
Fri, 20 Sep 1996 18:07:46 -0400 (EDT)


> > > The problem still to be fixed is a way to differentiate modules compiled
> > > for SMP and those for non-SMP. Working on it!
> >
> > Another $0.02 idea ... would changing the OS type from "Linux" to
> > "Linux-SMP" hurt anything? It sure would be easy to detect a SMP
> > kernel this way.
>
> Why not just make all the exported kernel interfaces the same whether
> the kernel is single processor or SMP? You shouldn't need to have
> multiple modules for kernels with different configurations. The fact
> that modules need to be recompiled based upon the kernel configuration
> is a bug.

I suspect that if it was that simple of a matter, somebody would have done
this already :-) Remember, SMP machines are really odd beasts because
of interrupt handling, cache coherency, locking, etc. I suspect an
all encompasing kernel could be built (including modules), but it
certainly wouldn't be small or optimized for the architecture.

--
Andrew E. Mileski   mailto:aem@ott.hookup.net
Linux Plug-and-Play Kernel Project http://www.redhat.com/linux-info/pnp/
XFree86 Matrox Team http://www.bf.rmit.edu.au/~ajv/xf86-matrox.html
PGP Public keys are available from http://www.redhat.com/~aem/pgp-keys.txt