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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
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Reply-To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
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Subject: Re: More nits
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 15:18:11 +0100 (MET)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <25708.815494187@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Nov 4, 95 06:09:47 am
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
> 
> > Why not?  It's bloating the kernel.  It's a *great* thing to have in
> > the generic kernel--I really like the visual editing--but it's just
> > ballast in a custom-built kernel which should have tuned all this
> > stuff already.
> 
> That's not a bad idea, we simply don't have it instrumented as a
> detachable component.  That's not to say it couldn't be, but there's
> always more work like this than we have time available to do and I'd
> probably be more inclined to spend the time fixing bugs, myself!
> 
> > to run around and boot the workstations.  They all fell flat on their
> > face: they only had 4 MB, and for some reason FreeBSD didn't recognize
> > the last 384K.  The result was that the systems ran out of swap before
> 
> We don't support 4MB configurations anymore and probably won't until
> significant work is done to make FreeBSD more dynamic.  Sorry, you
> missed that whole flam^H^H^H^Hdiscussion..  We hit the wall and went
> over it, and there's no going back without more work than there
> remains time for in the 2.1 timeframe.  I told people this would
> happen back at 2.0.5 but nobody took the warnings seriously enough
> until it was already far too late.

I'm not really bitching about this.  I tend to agree that 4MB is too
little memory for anything useful, but I still think it's worth
drawing to people's attention that we *don't* want a System V, and
that there are virtues in small, lean systems.  And I agree that now
that the config stuff is a permanent component of the kernel, it
probably won't go away.  All the more reason to bear the problems in
mind before starting the project.

Greg