slackware and kernel 2.4-24 question

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

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On Tue, 18 May 2004, Debee Norling wrote:

> When you compile Speakup as a module, what advantages/disadvantages does
> this give you?
>
Hi Debee,

The speakup modified kernels included with distributions such as
Alackware (including zipspeak) have all the drivers compiled into
the kernel, in order to accommodate anyone who might be using any
of the supported devices. That's a lot of kernel space wasted,
since each user will normally be using only one driver.
Compiling all the drivers as modules gets them all out of kernel
space except the onme you are using, and yet you can switch among
them without having to recompile. I have been playing with the
new softsynth support, and ikt is neat to be able to switch from
one device to another on the fly, without having multiple drivers
compiled directly into the kernel.

There is no observable performance penalty ether.

On the downside, the system does not start talking until the
desired driver module is loaded, and that happens late in the
bootup process. That means yhou do not hear those startup
messages. I was reluctant to give those up at first, but then it
dawned on me that I have probably never benefited from them being
there in the first place, and in the second place, I can recover
them (assuming the system comes up) with the dmesg command.

I have been using module drivers for a couple weeks now and am
very happy with them.

Another benefit: when an improvement or upgrade occurs in one of
the drivers, I can recompile only the drivers and not the whole
kernel.

Chuck


- -- 
The Moon is New
My home page is now at http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
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