Module or built in to the kernel 2608

addressed the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.miscas follows...:

As the other replying poster said, you can either enter "Y", "M" or "N" or a value directly, or you can cycle through the options using the spacebar.

Yes, perfectly.

It all depends... Distributions typically make use of aninitrdorinitramfsto boot their kernels with, and their kernels are intended to support as many different hardware set-ups as possible, so they typically include the necessary drivers in theinitrdorinitramfsand build most of the kernel modularly.

There are however some things which you should not build as a module but into the kernel itself instead, e.g. ELF binary support, IDE support, etc.

I normally tend to build my kernels non-modularly, but it is recommended that you would leave things like graphics drivers - for framebuffer and for X - modular, because too often, those drivers are proprietary - and thus come as modules only - and they may require frequent updating.

Again, like the other poster said, things like a SCSI adapter - if you have one - should be compiled into the kernel, as well as support for the filesystem types you use, e.g.ext3,-vfat(for floppies),reiserfs,et al.

Non-modular kernels are bigger to boot, but they're a tiny bit faster - although you won't normally notice that. Modular kernels usually require aninitrdorinitramfs- depending on how modular exactly you've made them - and will load a driver module once *per* device present.

By the above, I mean that if you have two NIC's of an identical type in your system and you use modular NIC drivers, the module will be loaded twice, while in a non-modular kernel, the driver would be inside the kernel image itself, and only once.

I would recommend using drivers built-into the kernel for most of your stuff, i.e. hard disk controller, filesystem type, soundcard, network adapters, and of course for the stuff necessary for the kernel to be able to run, such as ELF binaries,procfsandsysfs. I

n fact, most of what you need can be built into the kernel itself. It just might be wiser if you have proprietary video drivers from ATI or nVidia to compile support for that as modules.

Try not using aninitrdorinitramfs. That's just bloat. ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (registered GNU-Linux user #223157)