Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 08:53:51 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> Cc: John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD/alpha kernel status report Message-ID: <199805231553.IAA00882@antipodes.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 23 May 1998 12:32:42 BST." <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980523121937.15699E-100000@herring.nlsystems.com>
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> Mike Smith took on my hack and was intending to spruce it up a bit to make > a more generally useful standalone library and probably add ELF kernel > loading. Yup. I've been trying to work out how to separate the libkern bits from the kernel and make a completely standalone "libsa". The design of the NetBSD code is pretty clean, so writing a machine-specific backend will be fairly trivial in most cases. > > for what I would like to do with FreeBSD for bus/device support will > > require the ability to have the boot loader support loading multiple > > modules before the kernel starts running... and once this happens, we > > can essecially eliminate main from the kernel, and simply have it use > > the module loading code to initalize the kernel... > > Now I never thought of loading more than just the kernel from the > bootloader. Its a very good idea given that we (nearly) have a flexible > three stage loader. My original intention was to link the modules > critical devices (console, system bus, root disk) statically with the > kernel and load all the others during autoconfig as the system probes for > devices. Given that the bootstrap loader must already have access to the root device (remember that it may be a non-local filesystem), it makes sense to use that to construct a kernel similarly endowed, if that's possible. There's a lot of design missing here though - we would be better off starting with your planned arrangement, and adding boot-phase linking later, simply because that's closer to what we can achieve right now. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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