de-modularising for the win!

[Jon Masters]

On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 19:51 -0400, Kyle McMartin wrote:

> Heh, we come back to this again... Why can't we do a debug/nodebug style
> split for rawhide's built-in-ness? For release we do what's best for
> the silent (core sound modules built in, drivers not, since they're pigs.)
> majority...

That's a beautifully elegant idea Kyle! Another kernel subpackage that
remains modular (maybe even more modular too) while the main kernel can
then be more aggressive about de-modularizing some things.

FWIW, a couple of us are looking at ways to speed up modprobe.

* We clearly need a hashed index table to speedup loading, but some of
the existing patches add a bunch of complexity for no real speedup.

* Add a daemon mode that prevents modprobe having to reload its metadata
hundreds of times and then run this daemon only during startup to handle
the modprobe storm (and other times only by option).

Jon.