The article (not the comment linked to, which was quite informative) also has this:
> Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it.
Even 5 years go (and at least 10 years ago) you could remove ext3 and add add another filesystem without rebuilding the kernel. I know Red Hat at least included a helpful Makefile for precisely this purpose.
Rebuilding entire kernels in order to compile a single kernel module is a well known habit of early Linux uses, following advice from pre 2.x kernel days when loadable modules didn't exist that seems to have stuck around in the collective mind of the Internet.
Before distributions switched to initramfs, you had to have at least one filesystem compiled in, for bootstrap reasons, so that the kernel could mount the initrd.
I don't remember exactly when did initramfs get introduced, but I remember it was a relatively long time before major distros switched to it. TFA is old enough so that might have been the case back then.
10 years ago we still had mkinitrd in RH (source: I'm a programmer now, but in 2003 I was worked for Red Hat as an instructor for these topics). Initial RAM disks still had kernel modules in their gzipped filesystem and were rebuild able without rebuilding the kernel.
> Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it.
Even 5 years go (and at least 10 years ago) you could remove ext3 and add add another filesystem without rebuilding the kernel. I know Red Hat at least included a helpful Makefile for precisely this purpose.
Rebuilding entire kernels in order to compile a single kernel module is a well known habit of early Linux uses, following advice from pre 2.x kernel days when loadable modules didn't exist that seems to have stuck around in the collective mind of the Internet.