Excerpts from netbsd: 13-Aug-96 Re: LKM support for many fi.. "Justin T.
Gibbs"@freefa (2036)

[symbol table management for LKMs]

> >I personally would prefer a solution outside the kernel, for principal
> >reasons.
> 
> What are these reasons?

Do only in the kernel what cannot be done outside.
And: Keep It Simple and Stupid.

> I think that you have to have an LKM manager that knows what LKMs are
> loaded (or staticly in the kernel) and provides entry points for a loading
> LKM to request any LKMs it depends on to be loaded.

This can all be done externally - I think of a make-like dependency
tree, used by the LKM loader.

> It would also be
> nice to be able to separate portions of the LKM so that you don't have to
> load the whole thing in order to determine if the hardware it applies to
> is in the system.

This sounds nice - even parts of the static kernel could be dropped
once the system is up...
If this worked, I would never object against an internal symbol
table manager again (this is like shared libraries in the kernel).

best regards
Matthias Drochner