Adding new hardware involved loading a module in place of
rebuilding the whole kernel.
The standard Linux kernel has some drivers compiled inline, as part of the kernel itself. These
are the drivers required during the boot process. Kernel modules are loaded after login.
NOTE
Commonly, drivers for SCSI disk drives that you intend to boot are inline. If they aren??™t,
you couldn??™t access the drive.
Ingenuity has gotten around this problem of needing inline drivers, however. You can
use initrd to start a RAM disk. This creates a small kernel and the appropriate
device driver, which accesses the device and loads the actual kernel. You??™ll learn more
about this later in the chapter.
Some code can be only inline or in a module (for technical reasons), but most code can
be compiled either way. With fast modern processors and cheap memory, the performance
differences are negligible, but they are of concern when installing Linux on an
older, slower machine.
When compiling a kernel, you select inline or modular loading during the make config
step that you??™ll learn more about later.
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