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Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 17:30:12 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>
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To: "Mr. James W. Laferriere" <babydr@baby-dragons.com>
CC: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk>, Frank van de Pol <fvdpol@home.nl>,
        Keith Owens <kaos@ocs.com.au>,
        Linux Kernel Maillist <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Hardwired drivers are going away?
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"Mr. James W. Laferriere" wrote:
> 
>         This is just what the Heads are trying to do away with .  There
>         will only be module enabled kernels .  JimL

I suspect none of these "Heads" spend much time in protracted
email debug sessions.  Because the *first* thing you do is
ask the tester to compile the relevant driver into the
kernel.

The problems which the removal of this option will cause include:

1: Inability to look up symbols in the kernel elf image.
2: Breaks the kernel profiler
3: breaks kgdb
4: breaks ksymoops.

How often have we seen nonsensical backtraces here because
modules were involved?   Possibly we can include a table
of module base addresses in the Oops output and teach ksymoops
about it.

This proposal is, frankly, brain-damaged.  It will significantly
impeded kernel developers in remote problem diagnosis and it will
weaken the kernel development toolchain.

There's a lot of work to be done to overcome this damage, and
given the difficulty of getting debug tools into the mainstream
kernel, the damage may well be permanent.

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