GENERIC kernel issues

[Warner Losh]

On Mar 6, 2013, at 4:40 PM, Aleksandr Rybalko wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Mar 2013 15:16:02 -0800
> Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> Peeps,
>> 
>> If you make the boot process too complicated and it stops being "load
>> kernel via flash/NFS, boot" then people may just not bother. :-)
>> 
>> I know you're going for correctness and we're hampered by how "linux
>> does things', but I really do suggest that you first get working,
>> packaged, easily installed and updated systems using what we currently
>> heave before you try to make a 'much nicer but noone ever uses it'
>> solution.
>> 
>> Please don't fall down the trap of "over-engineering correctness that
>> noone will ever use." that software people do when they don't have
>> deliverables.
>> 
>> 2c,
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Adrian
> 
> Adrian, 
> 
> I hope you don't compile special kernel before first boot on
> every new laptop/desktop/server? :)))
> 
> We want also find such drugs for so mach fancy ARM world, so anybody
> will have a way to boot board with one of few install images, but not
> one per board.

We're also not talking about making it too complicated, but rather the reverse: how can we create fewer binary images. Since Linux is king in the embedded world, it seems self obvious that having our kernels be compatible with that will give us the least head wind. Having attempted to do something "right" without considering the prevailing environment before, I'd say that we will be miles ahead doing this in a sane way first, rather than kludging something together that kinda works on two boards. Today a single linux arm kernel will boot on hundreds if not thousands of different boards. We should learn from that experience rather than coming up with something that's NIH, but gets "something" done fast.

So far we haven't been hampered by taking this route, apart from some churn in email and the odd issue here and there. Ian has been hitting it out of the park, and none of the issues we've seen so far are show stoppers, especially if we go to a static PIC ubldr to increase the number of systems we can load on...  Then what we do with the elf headers suddenly doesn't matter at all. Or at least not as much...

Warner