Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 12:41:56 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: smp@csn.net (Steve Passe) Cc: kory@avatar.com, smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 3.0-970114-SNAP as starting point for SMP kernel Message-ID: <199701151941.MAA04161@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199701151733.KAA04604@clem.systemsix.com> from "Steve Passe" at Jan 15, 97 10:33:11 am
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> >Is it possible to setup a system with two releases? I would like to try > >out the 3.0-SNAP for SMP support, but I would like to be able to boot my > >2.1.5-RELEASE incase of trouble. > > I think that the differences are great enough that you would have to handle > them as two different OSes, ie. different partitions, etc. Yes. All of the utilities that operate on the kernel memory image (ps and so on) are not sufficiently abstracted through procfs to let them be usable across proc structure changes. The utmp/wtmp record size recently changed, and the change would be in the snapshot. Therefore the utmp/wtmp file would not interoperate between version (who, w, and so on would fail). There are many additional changes similar in scope. Fixing most of these means abstracting the interfaces; this would still fail backward compatability, but *would* guarantee forward compatability across future developement, so it's worth pursuing. Fully abstracting some of the tools (like ps) to operate on data-statites like procfs, means that the tools would no longer be usable against, for instance kernel dump images (kernel dump images can't run FS code to respond to abstract I/O requests). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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