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Kernel source tree for Raspberry Pi-provided kernel builds. Issues unrelated to the linux kernel should be posted on the community forum at https://forums.raspberrypi.com/
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Compile IPv6 support into kernel image #606

Closed grigorig closed 10 years ago

grigorig commented 10 years ago

IPv6 is the next-generation internet protocol and it's becoming more important quickly. Due to that, it should always be available, and should be compiled into the kernel image instead of merely being provided as a loadable module.

Ferroin commented 8 years ago

Agreed, and in fact, by that standard, there are large parts of the kernel that need to be made modular. Linux is not a pure modular kernel, period, and there is no way to make it such. If you want something like that, you need to be looking at a micro-kernel system like MINIX3 (which sadly does not run on the Pi (although it does run on the BeagleBone)).

Now, as to the issue of building IPv6 into the kernel, I'm not hugely sympathetic at this point. The Foundation obviously isn't going to do it unless something seriously changes, and it's not hard to build a kernel locally if you need it built in (and most people really don't (the only reason that I know of that you actually need it built in for is root on NFS without an initrd)). Yes, building a kernel takes a long time on a Pi, but that doesn't mean it's hard, that just means it takes time (and if you really want to complain about how long it takes, I would love to point out that I have an almost 20-year old PA-RISC system that a kernel build takes between 48 and 72 hours on, and know people with similarly old SPARCstations that take between 24 and 36, so I'm not all that sympathetic to people complaining about 8 hour kernel builds on a Pi).