From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 9 6:20:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailsrv.otenet.gr (mailsrv.otenet.gr [195.170.0.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E54FD37B41A for ; Fri, 9 Nov 2001 06:20:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from hades.hell.gr (patr530-b123.otenet.gr [212.205.244.131]) by mailsrv.otenet.gr (8.11.5/8.11.5) with ESMTP id fA9EKDB25877; Fri, 9 Nov 2001 16:20:13 +0200 (EET) Received: (from charon@localhost) by hades.hell.gr (8.11.6/8.11.6) id fA94J3t39686; Fri, 9 Nov 2001 06:19:03 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from charon@labs.gr) Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 06:19:02 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas To: Anthony Atkielski Cc: m p , FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Multi-processor Support Message-ID: <20011109061902.A39562@hades.hell.gr> References: <20011108105102.55942.qmail@web13308.mail.yahoo.com> <008c01c1688c$946e6ee0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <008c01c1688c$946e6ee0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22.1i 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 Anthony Atkielski writes: > m p writes: > > Do you know _why_ most of the FreeBSD people > > use customized kernels? > > Because much of what they want to do apparently cannot be enabled by simple > configuration switches at run-time (such as the change I desired above). Nope, not exactly. Because we like trimming our kernels to the absolutely necessary parts. For instance, if I count just the lines of GENERIC and LOCAL (the second being the configuration file I use for my own custom kernel), I see: $ wc -l GENERIC 236 GENERIC $ wc -l CHARON 119 CHARON Half of the devices supported by GENERIC are useless to me. So I rebuild my kernel to remove this code from my system's kernel. > > This is considered a normal and not risky task > > with FreeBSD. > > If it is just changing a configuration option, the risk probably > isn't too great. But sometimes you don't really know until the > system crashes. And, sorry, but FreeBSD is not magically immune to > this; no operating system is. No, but have you got any numbers to back this up? Hundreds of FreeBSD users have recompiled their kernels thousands of times. I somewhat find it hard to believe that they like crashing their systems. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message