Change to kernel+modules build approach

Andrew Gallatin gallatin at cs.duke.edu
Fri Aug 15 10:49:02 PDT 2003


John Baldwin writes:
 > 
 > No, generic modules would always work with all kernels except for
 > exceptional cases like PAE (unavoidable, really), and MUTEX_PROFILING
 > (this is a debugging thing, so ISV's wouldn't need to ship modules
 > with that turned on).  All this would add is the ability to build
 > modules optimized for your current kernel.  If this is not super
 > desired (which I wouldn't mind), then I think we should take the
 > modules out of /boot/kernel and put them in /boot/modules or some such.
 > I do want to get the metadata down to one copy somehow though.

YES!  YES!  I'd be very much in favor of totally decoupling the
modules from the kernel.

In fact, once we've done that, we can move the kernel back to /kernel
where it belongs, and /boot/modules can become /modules  ;)

BTW, what, exactly, changes size with PAE?  Everything?  Or would a
driver that just used things like busdma, mutexes, interrupts, etc, be
OK assuming the busdma interface were made so that they were always
64-bit?  


Drew


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