Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 00:28:05 -0500 (EST) From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New drivers and install floppy space Message-ID: <199812050528.AAA13608@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Mike Smith had to walk into mine and say: > At the moment, the current exploratory strategy is the split kern.flp/ > mfsroot.gz arrangement. It's probably going to make more sense just to > have them as two floppy images for distribution purposes. > > The alternative will be to have a single minimal kernel and mfsroot > floppy, and another floppy with a pile of KLD modules on it. This > won't be feasible until the PCI code moves to the new bus architecture > (soon we hope). I would like to see this too, but I would also like to see the ability to provide 3rd party drivers during the install. Not that I really want to encourage people to copy the behavior of Windoze, but it would make life easier for a lot of people (mainly us) to be able to provide FreeBSD drivers in object code form on a floppy diskette, and be able to specify 'install unlisted driver->have disk' and have it show a list of drivers present on the diskette and let the user load the ones he/she wants. This would mean having an installation utility that can parse some kind of description file that provides information about the type of driver, its name, and special loading instructions. We'd also need to provide a kit or sample Makefiles/scripts for generating driver object files and the description files. This would allow hardware vendors to provide drivers that can be loaded and used during installation of FreeBSD, and it would make it easier for users to load FreeBSD using newly written drivers (that is, written by us) without having to wait for the next release or build a custom installation floppy. It would also be nice to provide a kit for adding driver sources to /usr/src in addition to simply loading the driver object module, and strongly encourage driver developers to use it so that developers don't fall into the habit of only providing object code. We want the source code too, after all. Well, I do anyway. -Bill -- ============================================================================= -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City ============================================================================= "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness" ============================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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