Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 00:03:18 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: kernel w/o source? [MOD_DECL in lkm.h] Message-ID: <Mutt.19970104000318.j@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199701032151.IAA28481@freebsd1.cimlogic.com.au>; from John Birrell on Jan 4, 1997 08:51:43 %2B1100 References: <9701032029.AA09026@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> <199701032151.IAA28481@freebsd1.cimlogic.com.au>
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As John Birrell wrote: > So, I'm looking in my crystal ball, and what do I see that the future > will bring? Will devfs become univeral? Will we be able to get away Define `universal'. Devfs can certainly help towards auto- configuration, yes. Newly found devices will pop up in /dev automatically, stale entries will disappear. > from the (nasty IMO) need to have source installed to configure > a kernel? Certainly not. First, it would require somebody to implement the required Makefile and configuration infrastructure, as well as departing the config-dependant tables etc. from the drivers itself (what SysV has in their `space.c' files). This is already a tremendous amount of time. Naturally, people who enjoy having the source are very poor candidates to convince them of spending their time into this. The SysV developers had another goal behind it: not to hand you out the source code. That's been their driving force. BSD developers don't have this driving force, and even kernel compile times are no longer that much an issue. When we started with 386BSD 0.0 on our 386/16 machines, with 2 hours of kernel compilation, this was another matter. Right now, with a new kernel from scratch after quarter an hour, well, it's often just enough to get a cup of tea or coffee meanwhile. :) Second, you can't have compile-time options anymore then. IOW, you gotta include everything into the compiled object already, to make it run-time selectable. People might suddenly get the feeling that there's now also the kitchen-sink included. :) And, if being faced with a compile-time vs. run-time decision, the latter usually actually _costs_ run-time. So the kernel won't be only more bloated, but also slower. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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