From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 10 21:50:45 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id VAA03256 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:50:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost.lightside.com (user45.lightside.com [198.81.209.45]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id VAA03247 for ; Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:50:37 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jehamby@localhost) by localhost.lightside.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) id VAA00531; Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:50:16 -0800 Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 21:49:45 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby X-Sender: jehamby@localhost To: Terry Lambert cc: Sujal Patel , terry@lambert.org, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Pageable kernel? [was: PnP Proposal] In-Reply-To: <199601110303.UAA16329@phaeton.artisoft.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, Terry Lambert wrote: > As far as kernel bloat goes: we need pageable code for parts of the > kernel. A lot of people hate this, arguing that kernel paging is > bad... in which case, we should be keeping DOS loaded as part of our > boot code instead of reclaiming the 640k. 8-). You know, this would be a cool idea in any case. I know that the difficulty would be almost prohibitive at this point, and the end result might bear little (if anything) to the basic 4.4BSD kernel we have now, but I would LOVE to eventually see a fully pageable, modular microkernel-type design (with dynamic memory management) a la Solaris, where every filesystem, device driver, etc, is a separate file. I know, I'm dreaming, but it would still be nice... Of course the Solaris "microkernel" is about 900k, so I'm not sure we'd wind up ahead in the end.. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------