On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:27:50 -0500 Matt Domsch Matt_Domsch@dell.com wrote:
In this most drivers are still modular, just the often-used hotpaths are built-in, right? This avoids extra TLB lookups? Whatever happened to mapping modules into the extra space at the end of the kernel's 2MB TLB entries, to get the same benefit?
it's a lot more than that; it's also about boot speed; module loading is just slow by nature, and while it can be made a bit faster, fundamentally, avoiding it for common cases is just the better solution.