Re: Issue setting up Sync with Handspring Visor Deluxe

["David A. Desrosiers" <hacker gnu-designs com>]

> Am I correct & can this be done with the visor driver?  Do you (or anybody
> else)recommend doing?  If so, how much overhead does it cost?

	Unless you're on an embedded or real-time system (RTOS), where
loading speed is critical, you'll want everything not specifically required
to physically boot the machine, as modules. On embedded targets, the goal is
to have everything self-contained (preserves space, flash writes, speed,
etc.) but on a desktop/laptop system with spinning drives and megabytes of
RAM, you'll gain much more speed out of a kernel built with modules.

	A few reasons:

	1.) It keeps the physical kernel size in memory down to a bare
	    minimum. If you have a 900kb zImage file with everything built
	    in, that will unpack into memory into a 3-meg kernel, for
	    example. If your zImage is 500kb with external modules, it may
	    unpack into a 1.5-meg kernel in memory.  Accessing this kernel
	    will be much faster, at the penalty of a couple of milliseconds
	    of load time for inserting modules.

	2.) You don't have to reboot to edit, change, update a module. If
	    you build them into the kernel properly (monolithic kernel), you
	    have to rebuild the entire kernel and reboot, to test those
	    changes or updated modules. If you build a slim, lean kernel and
	    external modules (modular kernel), you simply have to rebuild
	    the module you need and install/insert it.

	There are several schools of thought on this. Some people insist
that if they know their hardware and that it will never change, they want
everything built into the kernel. There's absolutely no reason to do this,
and it will actually make for a "fatter" (in memory and access time) kernel
and slow down the machine a bit. It's negligible.

> Recommendations?

	Go modular, lean, slim, and if that fails to meet your needs, go
monolithic. It's really a personal decision in the end. I run a modular
kernel, for the most part, as do many other people I know, for exactly the
reasons I've described above.


d.