Trimming the default /boot/device.hints

[David O'Brien]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 09:47:32AM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> After the changes to make hints always reserve device names, soem folks ran 
> into issues with devices changing names due to previously unused hints now 
> always being honored (e.g. hints for non-existent ISA le(4) cards always 
> reserving le0).  What I would like to do to help minimize this further is to 
> trim the default set of hints.  The number of machines that will run 8.0 that 
> have ISA slots is incredibly small, probably zero.

For AMD64 machines its definitely zero.

> To that end, I would like 
> to remove all hints for ISA adapters from i386 and amd64 (amd64 already
> has most of them removed).
..
> If we wanted, we could go further and assume that all machines have
> either PnPBIOS or ACPI and remove most of the other hints as well.

At least for amd64, I'd like to see all the hints removed.  We should
make these assumptions.

For i386 you're getting some resistance, but I don't see any reason to
not do this for amd64.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)