On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Mulyadi Santosa <mulyadi.santosa@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi...

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 07:02, Graeme Russ <graeme.russ@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi All,

Naive question of the day:

I'm trying to cut down the size of a 3.3 kernel and one thing I have noticed is the TCP/IP v6 can be built as a module, but v4 cannot. Is there any particular reason for this, or is it simple a case of nobody has gone to the effort of modularising the v4 networking components?

IMHO it's mostly a matter of lack of modularitation (or we could say lack of deeper code refactoring too). Almost all of networking stack in Linux that I know (Novell's I-forgot-the-name, token-ring, Mac I-forgot-too) are switchable.

I suggest it's also a matter of motivation. How many network developers run without IPv4? Very few I guess, so they aren't very motivated to do push it into a module they can disable. If there is sponsor out there for the work, that would likely increase the motivation. Greg (not a kernel network guy)