I recently recompiled my kernel, but I was confused on whether to make options a module or not, what exactly is the difference? does a module only get loaded when its needed otherwise its constantly loaded in the system?

I went through this discussion with a few people probably a month ago. Modules are loaded dynamically, meaning they load once that feature/driver is requested. Built-in are always "loaded" because the kernel resides in memory.

Modules +/-
+ Using modules reduces the overall size of the kernel
+ Smaller kernel means more memory is available to other resources on bootup
+ If you didn't use said feature/driver, the module doesn't get loaded.
- When it is requested, it takes time to load. But we're talking mili-seconds probably
- you can delete/overwrite them. (I'm guilty of that one.)

Built-in Support
+ Always on, no loading.
+ You can't delete them, unless you delete the kernel. (Don't do that)
- Increase kernel size, (but we're talking kilobytes, most computers can handle it.)


My personal opinion after playing around with my laptop and compiling several kernels is that I think my laptop is faster with built in support. There are a few exceptions to that. Parallel port is a module, scsi-disk and usb support are modules, I think I left a couple file systems as modules too, but 90% or more are built in.

thanks a lot! this should be made a sticky, im sure itd help out a lot of ppl

No sticky. we have a search button