Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 11:54:16 -0700 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org> To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) Cc: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org>, hackers@freebsd.org, jkh@time.cdrom.com Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. Message-ID: <199509301854.LAA29955@aslan.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Sep 1995 14:48:25 EDT." <199509301848.OAA05922@etinc.com>
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>>Fixing LKMs (something even people with more than 4MB want) should take >>care of this. >>-- > >It really shouldn't. I think that what is needed is a "bootload" kernel and >a "generic" >kernel. While its ok for the generic kernel to be large, the "bootload" >should allow someone to >load the system and compile (or load) a custom kernel, which can be much >smaller. There's no >reason why the generic kernel has to be used on the boot floppy. I respectfully disagree. ;-) The "boot kernel" should have enough glue to load LKMs for anything from NFS support to your favorite SCSI driver off of the boot floppy (or even additional floppies). The LKM for device drivers should have an entry point that lets you determine presence of the hardware before committing the whole module to memory. In this way, a "generic" boot floppy could cycle through all LKMs asking them to do the probe and only load the full module (or perhaps unload the module in the event of failure) if the probe is successful. In this way, the only way you'd not be able to install in a low memory configuration is if you had everything but the kitchen sink in your machine. I want to move toward a more dynamic system where in most cases you don't have to recompile the kernel to get the right configuration for you system. LKMs seem the natural solution. >Dennis >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com > >Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For >Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame >Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 > -- Justin T. Gibbs =========================================== Software Developer - Walnut Creek CDROM FreeBSD: Turning PCs into workstations ===========================================
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