Re: [spi-devel-general] Re: SPI

[David B. <da...@pa...>]

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 12:25 am, Vitaly Wool wrote:

> Suppose you have a precompiled kernel w/o SPI support. Getting SPI to 
> work will imply recompilation of the whole kernel which is a) 
> inconvenient b) may be impossible due to some reasons, like not having 
> the full source tree of this particular kernel version :)

I don't think anyone should be making design decisions purely to make
life easier for people who are violating the (GPL) licensing for Linux;
that's which is what your point (b) boils down to ...

As for (a), compiling a kernel takes just a few minutes, and there are
plenty of other config options that imply it.


> Therefore I consider this a serious drawback, sorry. I2C core, as well 
> as MTD core etc. etc. can be configured as a module; our SPI core also can.

And, repeating myself, you _could_ submit a patch to let parts of the core
not be statically linked.  Even for things that are not, as I showed above,
any kind of "serious" issue ... like that 2KB of ".text" code.

But if you want counterexamples ... PCI didn't build as a module last time
I checked.  There's no mystical requirement that framework code all work as
modules.

- Dave