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initramfs status?initramfs status?Posted Aug 29, 2002 17:48 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: initramfs status? by cpeterso Parent article: The 2.5 device model I believe that nobody's managed to get all of the efficiencies of having things statically linked into the kernel with modules. Additionally, people keep reducing the duplication; there's no inherent reason a device driver can't act like a module while being linked into the kernel image (getting the code into memory and linked is the same for all modules; once it's linked, it can run the same whether it's always been there or was loaded dynamically). So it may turn out that the main useful idea of Alan's work (code initializes the same way regardless of whether it's in the kernel file or not) will be implemented without some of the other properties of the idea which people don't like.
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initramfs status? Posted Aug 29, 2002 22:21 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] >I believe that nobody's managed to get all of the efficiencies of having>things statically linked into the kernel with modules I believe there are no such efficiencies. I maintain the loadable kernel module ("module") HOWTO and have been collecting information on that question, and all I've come up with is one possible efficiency that statically linked modules have over dynamically loaded ones in that the base kernel lives in a block of virtual=real memory, whereas a dynamically loaded one may get loaded into a region where the virtual address is not the same as the real address. And that _may_ have some measurable effect on speed in _some_ architectures. But probably nothing significant. And even that is pretty easy to fix in the initramfs concept, since the loading of the base kernel and of all the other modules is happening at about the same time.
initramfs status? Posted Sep 1, 2002 7:42 UTC (Sun) by qubes (subscriber, #2562) [Link] A staticly linked kernel lives in a memory space mapped with 4M tlb entries. Loaded modules don't get loaded into the same memory space, and the jump to "far" addresses take longer then jumps within the same tlb. Given that, the difference is usually in the noise of any kernel profile.... initramfs really needs a developer to fall in love with the userland side of the problem...and Alan currently hacking on the IDE bits that will hopefully get stable in 2.5.
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