Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 01:26:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dcs@newsguy.com (Daniel C. Sobral) Cc: wes@softweyr.com (Wes Peters), mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org (Michael Lucas), advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New article Message-ID: <200003240126.SAA05518@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <38DAB25B.E2BBC400@newsguy.com> from "Daniel C. Sobral" at Mar 24, 2000 09:10:03 AM
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> > > Legacy hardware will still need to be hand configured (though not > > > necessarily built in the kernel), and some kernel options are probably > > > unavoidable. > > > > But could potentially be configured through a loader script, rather > > than compiled into the kernel. > > The legacy stuff, yes. I said so. :-) The kernel options... As I said > *some* as unavoidable. INVARIANTS? Get rid of all invariants. It has never made sense to me that the number of PCI busses or the number of SMP per-CPU contexts, or the number of mbufs, or any of dozens of other things were actually required to compile the kernel. For "I486_CPU" and similar things, well, I think this is really a silly thing to do, instead of loading the generic code, and then later loading the CPU specific code, after you know the CPU type, and then _unloading_ the generic code it replaced. The only real issues to work out are debugging options, which I have no problem with forcing the debugging engineer to place on the command line, or use a special build process. The MATH_EMULATE, INET, NFS, etc., are a no-brainer. The boot filesystem has to be set, but that's always FFS (unless you do a lot of fixing of the kernel, and then specify an alternative on the command line). VISUAL_USERCONFIG? The loader should load it, if it is needed, and unload it after it's done being used. Hell, the root device driver stuff should be done in BIOS or PPCBug or OpenBoot or ARCBIOS or SRM _or whatever_, and that should get replaced by a dynamically loaded hardware specific root device driver later... if there is one. If not, it should single thread through the BIOS, or whatever it has to do, and _just keep working_. Psuedo devices? If they are listed in a config file as being permissable to load, then put a node in devfs in /dev, and if it's referenced, load them then. Invariants, inschmeriants. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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