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SubjectRe: New snapshot of modutils

On 18 Feb 1999, Zygo Blaxell wrote:

> > User sets CD sound level, starts listening to CD.
> > Sound modules are unloaded.
>
> There's your real problem right there. If you want a device driver
> to preserve its state, don't unload its module. Conversely, if you
> unload a module, expect the device to be disabled.

I think this attitude is the correct one. Modules are convenient because
a system can be reconfigured for new hardware without a recompile, but I
think it's a mistake to treat modules as some weird form of demand paged
binary or swappable memory. It complicates issues, like preserving state
across module reloads, and it honestly has very little benefit on modern
machines with oodles of ram. Even machines with low memory I think would
benefit most by not autocleaning modules and allowing modprobe/insmod to
reside permanently in swap instead of consuming valuable ram.

I strongly believe that autocleaning should not only be removed from the
kernel, as has already been done, but that it should be discouraged from
user space as well. I suspect that for the majority of users there is no
real benefit, and those few users who will benefit from autocleaning are
undoubtedly smart enough to add the one-liner to /etc/crontab.


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