HEADS UP: Standalone kernel debug files moving out of /boot/kernel/

[Steven Hartland]

On 30/10/2014 09:47, O'Connor, Daniel wrote:
> On 30 Oct 2014, at 19:44, Steven Hartland <killing at multiplay.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 30/10/2014 08:24, O'Connor, Daniel wrote:
>>> On 30 Oct 2014, at 13:23, Steven Hartland <killing at multiplay.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> Making things harder to manage vs saving a little bit of space on the
>>>> root partition really doesn't sound like a good idea; especially when
>>>> with the ZFS install, which I would suggest is becoming the norm, the
>>>> root partition doesn't suffer from space issues anyway.
>>> Note that it’s not “a little bit” of space.
>>> [freebsd10 8:21] /boot/kernel >ll kernel *.ko| awk '{i += $5} END {print $5}'
>>> 49312
>>> [freebsd10 8:21] /boot/kernel >ll *.symbols | awk '{i += $5} END {print $5}’
>>> 212464
>>>
>>> i.e. the debug information is more than 4x larger than the code its for (!).
>> That's still a trivial about of space in the grand scheme of things.
> Yes.
>
>>> I agree managing the symbol files does become significantly more difficult in this case but the patch makes quite a substantial difference to the number of kernels you can keep in / (especially on older installs which have <1GB roots).
>> The better solution is to not use a 1GB root.
> Unfortunately once you install it’s impossible to expand. There are quite a few older systems that have been upgraded with relatively small root partitions.
I would suggest we treat those as legacy systems and look to improve the 
layout moving forward, instead of applying changes which make it more 
difficult to maintain for everyone.
>>> Perhaps there could be a flag to disable it just for the kernel that could be put into /etc/make.conf? That way it’s set and forget if you are kernel juggling.
>> Making it a none default option which can be used by those who have got
>> limited space on their root.
> Perhaps, but the defaults have been for quite small root partitions for a long time so I expect there are a lot of systems with a small root.
These systems are working fine though are they not? They may not be able 
to have loads of kernels installed but if you want to do that then its 
worth the pain of the reinstall instead of penalizing everyone.

     Regards
     Steve