From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 3 10:14:20 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA27846 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:14:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA27841 for ; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 10:14:18 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA15037; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 11:03:40 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199601031803.LAA15037@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: X for install To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 11:03:40 -0700 (MST) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <2046.820639273@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 2, 96 07:21:13 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > How small can a kernel be made and still have all the disk drivers > > in it? We'd want all the SCSI disk drivers, wdc, sio, sc, UFS, > > CD9660 and a fixed 8M memory limit. No swap stuff, no networking, > > no quotas. > > I'm not sure we would. Consider how NT does it - they have one disk > that contains the kernel bootstrap and another disk that contains > drivers, each of which it loads, tries and then tosses out again if > it's not needed. I'd be willing to go to 2 or more boot floppies > again if it were for something as nicely generic as that.. :-) This would require a VM86 mechanism for using the BIOS until the drivers are loaded. Like NT does it. I wonder if Microsoft took that idea from our discussions of VM86() disk drivers 4 years ago... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.