Enabling atapi-cam and other kernel features

[Glenn Dawson]

At 08:04 AM 1/7/2006, Alistar Erlas wrote:
>Recently, I read in the FreeBSD handbook, that in
>order to use the atapi-cam support, it has to be
>compiled into the kernel. Why not include the
>atapi-cam support in a module that can simply be
>loaded by the user without rebooting the machine?

test60# ls -l /boot/kernel/atapicam.ko
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  16892 Dec 31 00:21 /boot/kernel/atapicam.ko


>  It
>seems like it would be much eisier and less of a
>hassle that way. It seems like recompiling the kernel
>(I have done it before) is an awful lot of work

How is it a lot of work?  All you have to do is 
edit your kernel config, cd to /usr/src and do make buildkernel installkernel

>  just
>to be able to use some features of the DVD drive which
>most new computers have these days. The user should be
>able to add new hardware support to the kernel and
>reconfigure as much of it as possible without
>recompiling it, or even rebooting it. This is
>especially true in troubleshooting where quick changes
>may be needed and where recompiling each time a
>setting is changed becomes quite awkward. Allowing
>more run time configuration would both make FreeBSD
>more configurable and expert friendly as well as
>easier to use for everyone. I think in order to make
>software easy to use, it needs to be highly
>configurable, and not require a recompile just to add
>hardware support.

Most things don't require a reboot.  I count 440 
available modules in /boot/kernel, which makes it 
very easy to add support for something that's not already compiled in.

-Glenn


>Thank you.
>
>
>
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