Kernel Modules seperate from Kernel Core tarball?

Stephen Frost (sfrost@ns.snowman.net)
Thu, 23 Dec 1999 14:07:03 -0500 (EST)


On Thu, 23 Dec 1999, Marek Habersack wrote:

> * Daniel Silverstone (Kinnison) said:
> > > Unfortunatly, if what it's needs to do = what it's users need, and it's
> > > users need Linux to outperform NT at static web serving, then khttpd is
> > > the right thing. Also, it doesn't gunk up the rest of your system if you
> > > arn't using it. So it's not a big deal.
> >
> > But I, who pay for my telephone calls - and only have a 14k4 modem, don't
> > want to even download
> > httpd's for a kernel - especially when I don't want to use them.
> 21728B - tarred and gzipped, that's about 5sec on an average modem
> connection - how much would that be in $?? Come on...

His point is more that if we include all of userspace, the kernel is
going to get alot bigger.

> [snip]
> > But then again, I would love to be able to split the kernel tree up and make
> > it more modular.
> more? There are few things in the kernel driver tree that are NOT modular.

> > I don't want to be downloading ISDN, Amateur radio, and similar, if I never
> > ever use them.
> > I don't have an ethernet card at home, but have to get all the ethernet
> > sources also :(
> So DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM. Download the patches and live happily.

Erm, guess what? The patches include changes to the ISDN, Amateur radio
and other subsystems he may not be interested in as well. The patches aren't
just against the 'core' kernel tree, boy would that be a mess.
I would tend to agree that it would be somewhat neat if there could be
a way to download the core kernel seperately from the drivers/ directory. Then
be able to pick and choose what you want of the drivers/ directory. The same kind
of goes for the Documentation directory, stick the documentation for a driver w/
the seperate driver tarball. The same could also even be true for the fs/ and arch/
directories, and the net/ directory.
Looking at things, I would guess the 'core' kernel makes up something like
20M, and that's counting arch/. The total size is 71M (2.3.33). If you could pick
and choose what drivers, filesystems, network type, architecture and Documentation
you wanted before downloading the kernel, you could probably end up w/ something
like a 3M-4M bzip'd file instead of a 14M one. Or perhaps just download a number
of different files and end up downloading 5M total.
It's an interesting idea, though I don't personally know how practical it
would be, might require more effort than it is worth to split things up like that
and make everything still work. May also cause problems w/ one driver breaking
another and that not being noticed as quickly...

Stephen

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