Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:00:32 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: michaelv@HeadCandy.com (Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some recent changes to GENERIC Message-ID: <199607101900.OAA26133@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199607101655.JAA00383@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> from "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" at Jul 10, 96 09:55:34 am
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> >Only two arguments here:
> >. GENERIC is known to run on many installed machines, and while you
> > are right that it is possible (and desirable) to compile your kernel
> > from scratch once you are installed, many people decide not to do
> > it, for various reasons. (Among them, you have to sacrify 20 MB of
> > space for a kernel compilation, which is far too much for someone
> > with only a 100 MB disk.)
>
> Maybe I have a bad attitude, but... This is Unix. If they can't or
> don't want to build their own kernel, they should be running Windows
> or OS/2.
This is UNIX. Why don't we just type in bootstrap loaders and load off of
tape like we used to.
This is UNIX. We don't need no steenkin' sysinstall utility. Our users
like to manually fondle their disklabels.
This is UNIX. We don't need to ship a plethora of nifty utilities like
ncftp, traceroute, etc. along with the system. Let the user find, compile,
and install them.
Etc.
Pardon me, but I think it's a stupid argument.
Either we have to be UNIX-as-it-was, and die like it should, or we have to
be UNIX-for-the-next-century, which includes trying to build as useful a
system as we can, right out of the box.
We are SO close to this in SO many ways. What is this braindamage that we
are so intent on forcing people to build their own kernels to gain access to
common devices?
I know it isn't this way on the other variants of UNIX that I use that
support a GENERIC kernel. GENERIC on SunOS, in fact, was traditionally a
synonym for "The BIGGEST config file of them all"... look at SunOS 4.1..
(solaria.root.q4-2) 1:51pm /usr/kvm/sys/sun3/conf 11 # wc *
104 626 3556 DL
42 219 1298 DL110
35 174 1040 DL50
40 227 1331 DL60
41 212 1264 DL75
533 3109 16955 GENERIC
214 1170 6578 GENERIC_SMALL
56 366 2055 SDST110
57 372 2102 SDST160
54 335 1918 SDST260
43 248 1439 SDST50
48 301 1730 SDST60
82 554 3037 XDMT160
82 553 3027 XDMT260
72 498 2778 XYMT160
72 497 2768 XYMT260
Why? Because GENERIC held all the common configurations for all common
pieces of hardware for (probably) a dozen different Sun 3 systems. I can
plug in a Sun 3 GENERIC kernel on any Sun 3 system and expect all my common
hardware to be functional. Is it small? No. Is it optimized? No. Does
it work? Yessssssss....!!!!!!
If you want to sport an attitude just for the sake of sporting an attitude,
that's fine... there are enough UNIX elitists around (hey, I'm one too).
However, I'm not so blind to believe that we are superior just because we're
UNIX. It's easy to sport an attitude and believe you're better while the
rest of the world is passing you up on the Microsoft honeywagon.
... Joe
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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