On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 09:12 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
Harald Hoyer wrote:
Compiling these modules, which are loaded on nearly every PC, in the kernel ...
How about letting the end system administrator add modules statically. Make a utility program which uncompresses a kernel, incrementally adds (loads, as /bin/ld) a list of modules, then re-compresses the modified kernel. The original kernel needs a compiled-in ["meta-"]module to provide hooks for initialization of the added modules.
Meant to reply sooner, such is life, but I think this is a really bad idea - it's what some of the other OSes out there have considered, but it's not something that we should be doing IMO :)
You can't just add modules to the kernel in the manner that you describe, though conceptually it is a bit like that. For built-in modules, there is a module list with init functions called during bringup, and with a bit of munging one could get the kernel image "extensible" in this fashion...but it's not worth the effort.
Jon.