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Date:      Mon, 4 Oct 1999 11:23:41 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Kenneth Wayne Culver <culverk@wam.umd.edu>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 4.0 release
Message-ID:  <19991004112341.E40186@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9910032150310.29655-100000@rac8.wam.umd.edu>; from Kenneth Wayne Culver on Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 09:51:47PM -0400
References:  <19991004103426.Z40186@freebie.lemis.com> <Pine.GSO.4.10.9910032150310.29655-100000@rac8.wam.umd.edu>

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On Sunday,  3 October 1999 at 21:51:47 -0400, Kenneth Wayne Culver wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
>> On Sunday,  3 October 1999 at 10:06:52 -0400, Kenneth Wayne Culver wrote:
>>> On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Greg Lehey wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Saturday,  2 October 1999 at  7:45:26 -0400, Kenneth Wayne Culver wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Greg Lehey wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Friday,  1 October 1999 at  7:11:12 +0000, Sabre wrote:
>>>>>>>> The questions was "What can I expect from 4.0-RELEASE?" The answer is:
>>>>>>>> 1) Installation bugs. x.0 releases are always a test of grit. :-)
>>>>>>>> 2) A tight, small kernel with hot loadable module support.
>>>>>>>> 3) Vastly improved NFS.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Ya, better NFS!  Actually, I'm quite happy with the NFS stuff I have now
>>>>>>> setup (got the permissions all setup and everything is running great :)
>>>>>>> The hot loadable kernel is going to ROCK!
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The kernel won't be hot loadable, you'll just be able to load
>>>>>> modules.  In fact, you can do that with 3.3, so this isn't specific to
>>>>>> 4.0.
>>>>>
>>>>> I was under the impression, (maybe I'm wrong here) that 4.0-RELEASE will
>>>>> have nearly all the drivers configurable to run as modules or compiled
>>>>> into the kernel.
>>>>
>>>> Well, there isn't much alternative, and that's the way it is with
>>>> 3.3-RELEASE.  There will be relatively few differences in 4.0, though
>>>> some programs will attempt to load a module if they find it isn't in
>>>> the kernel.
>>>
>>> I just thought it would be cool maybe to have modules for the sound driver
>>> too. And maybe for the scsi drivers. I mean to give those linux people
>>> another reason to switch. (If we make this an option, many people will
>>> switch from linux, A lot of my friends wouldn't switch until I told them
>>> that FreeBSD has KLDs, which are very similar to linux kernel modules)
>>
>> I'm a fan of klds, but I don't think they're that important, and they
>> pose some interesting problems, which Linux hasn't attempted to
>> solve.  I don't expect the SCSI driver to be modularized in the near
>> future, but it's possible that sound would be.
>
> Hmm, well, I just thought it was cool to dynamically load drivers, and
> unload them when you no longer need them. And I thought it was even cooler
> with actual devices, instead of filesystems and such. I don't know that
> I've heard too many of the problems before, but I want to cut my kernel
> size down, it's getting up there (1.5 MB)

At the end of every message I send to -questions, I write:

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How likely are you to unload a SCSI driver?  In practice, unloading
modules has far-reaching effects, and you'll find that, once you've
loaded them, most of them are there to stay.

Greg
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