Building in random drivers hurts the majority

[Ben Collins]

In karmic there are 33 pata and 12 sata drivers built-in to the kernel. This may seem like a good idea, but in fact it causes more problems than it solves.

First off, including a driver that is only used by 0.1% of users will in fact hurt the other 99.9%. The extra amount of code loaded into memory will use up pages, and make it more likely to have a cache miss, and become detrimental to performance over-all.

The only real gain of making a hardware driver built-in, is to benefit the majority of users. Things that can fall into this category are ahci driver, which is in-use on almost all chipsets (this includes nvidia and intel).

In my case, the pata-acpi driver is built-in and it is getting bound to my promise pata before the promise driver can. I have to rebuild the kernel because I cannot disable pata-acpi.

Please, go back and remove all of these and review each inclusion based on the amount of users it benefits.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

As part of the configuration review we have pulled out all of the PATA modules and most of the SATA modules which should resolve this.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

This bug was nominated against a series that is no longer supported, ie karmic. The bug task representing the karmic nomination is being closed as Won't Fix.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.