On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 04:34:55PM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

quoted

If you'd aim for a small kernel image, you would build anything as a module 
that is not requred for booting.

Yes, there is a tradeoff for both.

Example:
16:30 ichi:../net/802 > l fc.o fc.ko 
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 7961 Dec 27 15:19 fc.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 2453 Dec 28 23:58 fc.o
(from a recent not-so-complete patch turning CONFIG_FC etc. into =m)

If fc was modular, it might save the 2453 bytes off the core kernel image,
but adds ~5508 bytes to disk.
So one has to pick =y or =m depending on whatever suits his/her situation.

May I ask something that might be obvious for most of the
development community:

Modules have to be loaded in seperate pages, right ?

Does that mean that each module wastes partially used
pages of memory at runtime ?

I've always tried to build as much into the kernel image as
possible, because all of my systems have only 512M memory.

Thanks,
Patrick