What is /boot/kernel/*.symbols?

[Ruben de Groot]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 10:46:50AM +0200, Dimitry Andric typed:
> On 2009-07-06 10:41, Dan Naumov wrote:
> > atom# uname -a
> > FreeBSD atom.localdomain 7.2-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p1 #0: Tue
> > Jun  9 18:02:21 UTC 2009
> > root at amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
> > 
> > atom# du -hs /boot/kernel*
> > 205M    /boot/kernel
> 
> Right, so it's a lot bigger on amd64.  I guess those 64-bit pointers
> aren't entirely free. :)

I'm not sure where the size difference comes from. I have some sparc64
systems running -current with symbols and the size of /boot/kernel is
more comparable to i386, even with the 8-byte pointer size:

> uname -p
sparc64
> du -sk /boot/kernel
137918  /boot/kernel

> So indeed, on amd64 and possibly some other 'big' architectures (ia64?),
> cranking the default root filesystem size to e.g. 1024M would be nice.

Indeed.