Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 16:39:45 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Dave Hayes <dave@jetcafe.org> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE not easily scalable to large servers ... ? Message-ID: <3CC5F0C1.DF1CCF83@mindspring.com> References: <200204232020.g3NKKJb38154@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org>
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Dave Hayes wrote: > So, it's time to question the assumption that the information you want > available should be in "a book". > > Many websites have "annotation" as a form of ad-hoc documentation > (e.g. php.net). Why not have someone take a crack at documenting the > FreeBSD kernel, and perhaps use some annotation feature to create a > "living" document which (hopefully) comes close to describing the > kernel architechture? > > If you want to track a moving target, perhaps you need to use a moving > track? How does the person or persons involved in documenting the internals to sufficient detail to be useful to third parties get paid for the effort? We are talking the work equivalent of a full time job. If they aren't paid, what's the incentive to create documentation above and beyond the status quo? If that incentive exists, what's the URL for the documentation that was created as a result? I think I can count on my fingers the number of people who know the various aspects of the boot process well enough to document it for people who want to hack on it to, for example, declaratively allocate physical memory as part of the boot process. A lot of the information in this thread was never collected centrally anywhere before (e.g. the missing piece about the files to modify and the calculation of the NKPDE value that was left out of David Greenman's posting of a year ago). Most of this information will be quickly out of date, since as soon as you document something, people understand it enough to realize the shortcomings, and so nearly the first thing that happens is the shortcomings are corrected, and voila, your documentation is now out of date. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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