A_brief_story_of_hier

andrewdomain.com

3 pointscassepipe3 comments

The original reasons for having the system files scattered about have not applied for a long time; but there was no harm in sticking with the accepted convention, and it was a good place to stick the bikeshed debaters while others got on with more substantial, real work.

History rhymes, when it doesn't repeat: Kernel modules once had an important purpose of saving memory by not loading code to support hardware you didn't have. That's not so important now, so who cares about that whole mechanism anymore?

> That's not so important now, so who cares about that whole mechanism anymore?

It's not so important on desktops or larger machines, but it's still very important for many smaller platforms.

It's also extremely useful to be able to easily add/remove kernel modules for certain debugging tasks.

But since the convention is not the product of well defined semantics, it's quite loose and it is hard to interpret.

Then it defeats the purpose of a convention, doesn't it ?

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