Date: Wed, 02 Dec 1998 18:22:02 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: KLD - what's the idea? Message-ID: <199812030222.SAA03196@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Dec 1998 18:13:16 PST." <199812030213.SAA03115@dingo.cdrom.com>
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> > or to unload unused segments and > > reload them on the fly during further probe/attach requests (ala Linux). > > It would certainly be feasible to arrange for the firmware images to be > loaded from separate files, should that be an acceptable alternative. > I'm open to suggestions on how to make this economical and robust... I should probably have expanded here; I was thinking for some time about the usefulness of optionally having two modules associated with a driver; the core driver code and the 'init' module for the code. You'd normally put these into two separate files, so for 'foo' you'd have foo.ko and foo_init.ko. There are issues about how you express the dependancies between these modules: foo_init depends on foo, but foo also has an init-time dependancy on foo_init. >From the loader's perspective, you'd load the two of them together (either as a result of some dependancy or explicitly out of the config metainformation), the foo_init module would do its work and then (somehow) determine that it was no longer required and free (most of?) itself. >From a pragmatic perspective, I guess my major concern is whether this elegance is warranted; you save a few pages of kernel space, but on the sort of systems where these devices are common such a saving is relatively infestimal. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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