> I agree. Currently, none of the OSes that have seemless or semi-seemless 
> module support (Linux and FreeBSD) support stable kernel module ABIs as far 
> as I know.

Try  Solaris or UnixWare????


> True. Unfortunately, functon calls are considered "bad" by some programmers 
> concerned with performance. I don't think it is much overhead (even on older 
> machines), but if it is a very frequent call it will add up.
> Gain: ABI, loss: some slight performance.

It may not! on a modern cpu, and if the functionis called often enough
from different places, then having the function in the I-cache
may give a performance improvement over repeatedly reading in the
instructions from memory.

Unrolling loops can be doubly disadvantageous - because extra code
has to be read in and because other code you might want again is
displaced from the cache.

Unfortunately benchmark tests tend to have all the code resident
in the cache after the first interation.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk