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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