From owner-freebsd-current  Wed Sep 30 16:40:10 1998
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To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
cc: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net>,
        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: comment about verbose booting 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 30 Sep 1998 16:30:18 -0400."
             <199809302030.QAA17624@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> 
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 07:34:03 +0800
From: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>
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Garrett Wollman wrote:
> <<On Wed, 30 Sep 1998 21:24:43 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.
    dk> said:
> 
> > If your're asking me, the identification of the VGA chips is
> > something which should be killed, it doesn't belong in the kernel.
> > You can do that from userland, there is no need to stuff potentially
> > unlimited number of ascii-strings into the kernel, in particular
> > considering that it doesn't use them after having printed one of
> > them at boot.
> 
> But we'll have ELF kernels soon enough, so theoretically we could put
> all of that stuff in its own section and then release the memory after
> boot.
> 
> Isn't that what Terry is always flaming about?
> 
> -GAWollman

Don't joke...  It's not all that difficult - the main problem is one of 
fragmentation and the memory impact if we keep skipping page boundaries to 
avoid bloating the kernel image (or .o or .so).  Trynig to reclaim a page 
in the middle of chunks of in-use data isn't fun.

One possibility is if it ends up in a plaintext file in /boot somewhere as
part of a control mechanism for assigning a driver.o file to a pci or pnp
device id or a mapping between a probe module and a driver itself.

Yes, /boot could work on a NFS mount for diskless support or on a dos or
cdrom partition.

Cheers,
-Peter



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