Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 18:50:36 +1100 (EDT) From: Darren Reed <avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au> To: gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu Cc: avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bus/Processor specific I/O methods - was Re: Beginning SPARC port Message-ID: <199712150750.XAA01781@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <19971214225639.55532@hydrogen.nike.efn.org> from "John-Mark Gurney" at Dec 14, 97 10:56:39 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In some mail from John-Mark Gurney, sie said: > > hmm... here's a question for you... > how much kernel work have you done in making the freebsd kernel as small > as possible?? with the changes that I'm working on... the ONLY things > neccessary in a static kernel will be the boot device (be it network > card or hard disk), and file system for modules... then the rest will > be dynamicly loaded... Well, the Solaris2 kernel is 600k (/platform/sun4m/kernel/unix) for 2.5.1, but /platform/sun4m is 4.5M in size with another 1.5M in /usr/kernel. Personally, I find as the number of files required to boot into single user increases, the greater the chance of shit happening on a bad crash and the system becoming unable to boot itself. Personally, I think that the boot device and root fs should always be "in" the kernel so that if someone has nuked all your modules, you can still get up into single user mode. I think that whilst the above goal is interesting (and perhaps worthwhile), there are already problems which need to be solved for LKM's which aren't, as yet, such as merging LKM symbols so that gdb on the kernel is sane and fixing up crash dumps.. Darren
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199712150750.XAA01781>