From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 10 12:02:25 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA05276 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:02:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.109.160]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id MAA05271 for ; Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:02:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id OAA26133; Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:00:33 -0500 From: Joe Greco Message-Id: <199607101900.OAA26133@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Subject: Re: Some recent changes to GENERIC To: michaelv@HeadCandy.com (Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:00:32 -0500 (CDT) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199607101655.JAA00383@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> from "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" at Jul 10, 96 09:55:34 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >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