What should be in GENERIC? (was Re: Facilitating binary kernel upgrades)

[Colin Percival]

Tom Grove wrote:
> Richard Bejtlich wrote:
>> After speaking with Colin, he mentioned that IPSec, NAT, and disk
>> quotas (enabled via options QUOTA) are the three most popular kernel
>> changes that prevent people from running GENERIC and hence using
>> freebsd-update for binary kernel updates.
>>
>> Can anyone shed light on why those three features are not available in
>> GENERIC?
>
> My guess is that just because those are the three most popular kernel
> changes that prevent people from running GENERIC doesn't mean that the
> majority of users implement these changes.

I find this argument hard to accept.  The vast majority of FreeBSD users
will never need the NFS_ROOT option, and many systems do not even have
the hardware for serial or parallel ports, yet those are supported in the
GENERIC kernel.

In deciding what options should go into the GENERIC kernel, I think the
question we should be asking is not "how many people use this?", but
instead "would adding this option inconvenience more people than it would
help?".

Colin Percival