What should be in GENERIC? (was Re: Facilitating binary kernel
upgrades)
John-Mark Gurney
gurney_j at resnet.uoregon.edu
Wed Nov 9 00:30:25 PST 2005
Miguel wrote this message on Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 14:09 -0600:
> John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>
> >GENERIC is already so large, that if you want/need a smaller kernel,
> >you're going to rebuild anyways,
> >
> >Since I care about that extra 2megs, I recompiled my own kernel,
> And the real problem of a big kernel is????
> I dont understand exactly why do you have to recompile, unless a new
> future is needed, like SMP, isnt it?, what harm is doing those extra megs?
> May be you could clarify on this (for the newbies... :-) ), i always add
> things to generic instead of cut them down, especially that im not an
> expert on every future commented there, and i am scared to break working
> things, openbsd recomends dont recompile, shoul we?
In the general case, no, you do not need to recompile.. Those extra
megs aren't doing any harm... (besides taking up memory)..
I recompile because I'm both familar with the kernel (if I break
anything, I can clean it up) , and the extra size of the kernel means
that I loose that much memory to running programs... As I said, now
days it's not nearly the same, but when I started using FreeBSD, I had
4megs of memory, so saving 300kb was a HUGE deal...
In other cases, we use FreeBSD at work on a device w/o swap, and we
are constrained by memory, so saving a few megs gives us a bit extra
room...
Hmmm... maybe we should ship the SMP kernel along with the GENERIC
kernel? That'd probably save a bit on new users, though now that we
are shipping debug kernels, that'd bloat / by another 20+megs.. :(
--
John-Mark Gurney Voice: +1 415 225 5579
"All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."
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