Re: A newbie's view

["Thomas Womack" <thomas.womack@merton.oxford.ac.uk>]

>> Is there anything in the current kernel architecture that makes it impossible
to
>> distribute vmlinux and a directory full of precompiled modules; when support
for
>> new hardware comes out, you download new modules to put in the directory,
when a
>> new version of the kernel comes out, you download a new vmlinux file, replace
>> the old one and reboot?
>
>this isn't a dumb questions at all tom.
>But most distributions do this now (to some extent)

OK, I've just been looking in precisely the wrong place; I tend to read about
Linux development on linux.dev.kernel, where (unsurprisingly) everybody's
building everything from source, and then assumed that *everybody* had to build
everything from source. All the people around college talk about frequently
recompiling the kernel; it's just that all the people around college are keeping
up with the point releases ...

From some vague remarks on l.d.k, I read that modules for kernel 2.2.foo would
tend not to work with 2.2.bar; this isn't a *problem*, but sounds as if the sort
of fine-grained incremental updating that would seem ideal is impractical.

This is much nicer than I'd expected.

Tom

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Linux-future: thinking about the future of the Linux kernel
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