On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:57:27 -0700 (PDT)
David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:48:12 -0700

quoted

But I do think we should see some evidence that people are actually
using CONFIG_ETHTOOL=n in real setups.

Heaven help them if they want to debug any real problems that
might involve checksumming, TSO, and other offload features.
Heaven help them if they want to probe the driver or firmware
version of the card they are using.

Presumably they would enable ethtool (and a whole bunch of other
debugging things) during development.  In previous lives I've seen
development boards which have double the memory of production boards
simply so that the developers can get their work done.

I'm sure you can find someone who runs with CONFIG_STAND_ON_MY_HEAD=y
but that doesn't mean that supporting such an option upstream makes
any sense.

Well yes, embedded developers do patch the hell out of their kernels
and presumably they will always do so.  The idea here is to bring
things inwards to reduce the amount of patching which these people need
to do.

If they don't do this then tens of millions of devices will be burdened
with many kilobytes of code which they will never ever need.