First off, I am aware of most of the advantages and disadvantages
of the two approaches, however I don't particularly see any
difference in the areas that are interesting to me: Performance.
As far as memory consumption is concerned, on a modern system
with 64Mb of RAM or higher - a monolithic kernel's increased size
is lost in the noise. A few hundred Kb of drivers built in do
not use up any significant amount of memory that is noticed -
not on my 96Mb system anyways.
What additional overhead is there when a module gets called?
Assuming that a module like af_packet is loaded allready - how
much more cruft is between the calling code and the content of
the af_packet code when it is in a module. Is it a single
function call overhead? Or is it more than that? Does it get
hacked up by the module loading process to appear statically
linked anyways - giving no overhead?
Is the overhead associated with modules only module-load/unload
overhead?
Aside from these questions, are there any particular kernel
sybsystems/drivers/whatever that do significantly work better or
faster in kernel, and is measurable from userland?
Would any differences be measureable on a home PC, versus a busy
server? In other words, would a server benefit by measureable
differences, whereas a home PC wouldn't probably make much
difference at all?
I'm just curious because a lot of stuff I compile modularly ends
up loaded 24/7 anyways, and a 'more' monolithic kernel - if
faster would be prefferred. I just don't want to do so if there
won't be much real noticeable gain.
Please reply privately and not to the list. Thanks in advance
for any information.
TTYL
-- Mike A. Harris Linux advocate Computer Consultant GNU advocate Capslock Consulting Open Source advocateJoin the FreeMWare project - the goal to produce a FREE program in which you can run Windows 95/98/NT, and other operating systems.
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