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Re: Debian modules



Jim Popovitch wrote:

Seriously now, why do all the Debian-ISP users need sound modules loaded (and consuming kernel resources, etc) on their servers? Take that logic and apply it to the rest of the unnecessarily loaded modules. I can't believe that I am the first (I am new to using Debian on servers) system admin to complain about this. "Rolling your own" shouldn't be an answer, it sounds more like an excuse for bad design. I don't mind rolling my own kernel for a home PC, but hundreds of servers with differing hardware... what a waste of time. Even Redhat gives you a way to control which modules load, I can't believe this isn't an option on Debian. Debian systems should honor /etc/modules, and *not* continue to load everything else.


OK. I don't get your gripe. It seems like you are just annoyed that modules you don't want loaded are being loaded. This can only happen in one of two ways: 1) you explicitly told the system; 2) you are using some autodetection tool. Now, if you are not doing 1, then you must be doing 2. It stands to reason (from the system's point of view) that if your system has some piece of hardware, you probably want the driver loaded so that you can use it. If you don't want the system autoloading drivers, then uninstall discover/hotplug/whatever that is actually doing the autodetection and loading.

As far as wasting resources, I have a hard time with that being a real problem. I have a number of machines (both servers and desktops). On all of those machines, only one as a single module that is over 256kB (it happens to be the proprietary nVidia driver, which is nearly 4 MB). Besides, most of the drivers are well under 100kB. Even with several dozen modules loaded, it is still not going to be more than a few MB.

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto



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