From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jun 7 10:26:17 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail.integratus.com (miami.integratus.com [63.209.2.83]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 808CC37BF16 for ; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 10:26:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jar@integratus.com) Received: (qmail 7943 invoked from network); 7 Jun 2000 17:26:05 -0000 Received: from kungfu.integratus.com (HELO integratus.com) (172.20.5.168) by tortuga1.integratus.com with SMTP; 7 Jun 2000 17:26:05 -0000 Message-ID: <393E85AD.F487B2C1@integratus.com> Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 10:26:05 -0700 From: Jack Rusher Organization: Integratus X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: kerneld for FreeBSD References: <20000607013058.A32270@firedrake.org> <20000607014353.A10364@cokane.yi.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Coleman Kane wrote: > > I really don't think that stupidity is the issue, there are plenty of > devices which you use very discretely which may only need support every > once in awhile. > It might be nice to start running on modules regularly. It would also be > useful to be able to update your device driver while running freebsd, > without needing to reboot. Another note on the loadable/unloadable driver tip: SCSI, USB, and Firewire are all adaptable bus architectures that allow you to add and remove devices from your system at will. There are dozens of situations in which you might wish to hot swap devices. If I, for sake of argument, wanted to remove one of my SlowAssDrive2000 disks from my server and replace it with a NiftyFastDrive2001, why should I have to reboot? Why shouldn't the server automatically unload the driver if the bus protocol gives me registration/deregistration information? I guess I don't see the harm in a ref count system for device drivers on hot swappable bus architectures. Does anyone want to see a tiny FreeBSD kernel that pulls in drivers via an /etc/system style configuration file? Let's stop attacking these ideas as foreign evil and start looking for any interesting notions that we can use. Thanks, -- Jack Rusher, Senior Engineer | mailto:jar@integratus.com Integratus, Inc. | http://www.integratus.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message