pfsync in GENERIC?

[Steven Schlansker]

On May 29, 2009, at 1:44 PM, Mel Flynn wrote:

> On Friday 29 May 2009 20:38:54 Steven Schlansker wrote:
>
>> And not to be argumentative, but sys/conf/NOTES does not really
>> provide any information.  The only comment explains what the device
>> does, not why it wouldn't be enabled in GENERIC.  Is there any reason
>> it could not be?  (For those of us who want to use freebsd-update,  
>> for
>> example)
>
> Choice of the project. You'd have to ask on -current, -pf or - 
> hackers for a
> more authoritative answer, but my guess would be that 80% of the  
> people using
> this feature in production have a highly optimized kernel and  
> wouldn't be
> using GENERIC to begin with.

Hm.  I was actually under the impression that you wouldn't gain much  
by compiling your own kernel (except for maybe some disk space).  Is  
that not the case?  Is there a strong reason to compile your own  
kernel for "production" machines?  The discussion online is not  
conclusive (then again I'll probably just get contradictory opinions  
again here!)

I'm just thinking that since pf is included in the base distribution,  
there's enough people that use it that it's worth including.  It seems  
that pfsync would be a negligible addon, and much more attractive due  
to the lack of support for building it as a module.

Anyway, if I have further questions about pfsync in particular I guess  
I'll go ask -pf.  I may have some free time coming up; maybe I'll even  
try my hand at hacking on the kernel and see if I can't make it build  
as a module... (would that be a semi-reasonable project for someone  
with light familiarity with kernel coding?  I've coded up Linux kernel  
modules before, but haven't worked in-tree on a "real" OS)

Best,
Steven