From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Nov 6 2:50:49 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from www.digitalspy.co.uk (np-dsl-216-12-209-2.ev1.net [216.12.209.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2814737B41A for ; Tue, 6 Nov 2001 02:50:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (mh_lists@localhost) by www.digitalspy.co.uk (8.10.2/8.10.2) with ESMTP id fA6AocE20012; Tue, 6 Nov 2001 10:50:38 GMT Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 10:50:38 +0000 (GMT) From: Mark Hughes To: Anthony Atkielski Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Multi-processor Support In-Reply-To: <001f01c166ad$5ac379a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Mark writes: > > Think of it this way - most systems in use with > > FreeBSD right now, I would imagine, have only one > > processor, so does it make sense to clutter the > > generic kernel with code that most systems won't > > use? With a source-provided OS, there's no need > > to do that. > Recompiling the OS to make configuration changes is rather dated for most > systems. We're talking about the kernel, not the entire OS - that's another matter.. > The problem with rebuilding the OS is that, if you make any mistakes, > you may not be able to boot the system at all, and this risk is generally enough > to outweigh any insignificant savings in run-time resource consumption incurred > by excluding a few snippets of code. This is why so much is done with > configuration files and runtime parameters these days. Individual application > systems are rarely rebuilt to make configuration changes for the same reasons. Yup, and with most things that you can recompile the kernel to use/enable, I believe there are kernel loadable modules to enable support if you don't want to recompile the kernel. I don't know if this is the case for SMP - I would guess not but I've never looked into it. Individual application systems would be setup then left to get on with their job, as you yourself were saying the other day there's no reason to change something that does it's job perfectly, so you'd set it up, recompile a custom kernel, then leave it. There would be no reason to recompile the kernel once it is in production. Regards, Mark -- Mark Hughes - DVD & Film Content Manager, Technical Officer Digital Spy Ltd http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ Your number one source for digital media and entertainment news! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message