I'm not surprised that you are wondering why modules are useful. Most of the reason of that is that the Linux distributions have not caught up with what they can do. That's including Debian.
It's now possible to build a kernel with little more than the ramdisk and console drivers and load everything else including the driver for the root disk from a module (see the initrd documentation). That means that the user can put together an efficient kernel without recompiling. I wanted to have this for 1.2, but it'll have to wait for 1.3 . Not having to recompile the kernel is a big ease-of-use issue. Also, with "kerneld" you actually do unload modules when you are finished using them. Unloading modules is a nice feature because drivers and the rest of the kernel live in locked-down (rather than virtual) memory. It's nice to be able to re-use that memory. Thanks Bruce -- Bruce Perens K6BP [EMAIL PROTECTED] Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key. PGP fingerprint = 88 6A 15 D0 65 D4 A3 A6 1F 89 6A 76 95 24 87 B3 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]