What should be in GENERIC? (was Re: Facilitating binary kernel upgrades)

[Marian Hettwer]

Colin Percival wrote:
> Tom Grove wrote:
> 
>>Richard Bejtlich wrote:
>>
>>>After speaking with Colin, he mentioned that IPSec, NAT, and disk
>>>quotas (enabled via options QUOTA) are the three most popular kernel
>>>changes that prevent people from running GENERIC and hence using
>>>freebsd-update for binary kernel updates.
>>>
>>>Can anyone shed light on why those three features are not available in
>>>GENERIC?
>>
>>My guess is that just because those are the three most popular kernel
>>changes that prevent people from running GENERIC doesn't mean that the
>>majority of users implement these changes.
> 
> 
> I find this argument hard to accept.  The vast majority of FreeBSD users
> will never need the NFS_ROOT option, and many systems do not even have
> the hardware for serial or parallel ports, yet those are supported in the
> GENERIC kernel.
>
And they should stay supported in GENERIC, since these are features you 
want to use if you have quite a big serverfarm and want to do PXE 
(speaking of NFS_ROOT). :)


> In deciding what options should go into the GENERIC kernel, I think the
> question we should be asking is not "how many people use this?", but
> instead "would adding this option inconvenience more people than it would
> help?".
>
I agree.
Today I upgraded my private rootserver to 6.0-RELEASE (good job folks!) 
and it's running the GENERIC. Since I want to use quota's and need 'em, 
I have to compile my own kernel.
But... well, what the hack, I'll do it anyway to strip down the GENERIC :)

Just my 0,02 cents.

6.0-RELEASE looks really good (as it already looked good in RC1). Keep 
up the good work.

Best Regards,
Marian

PS.: For whom it may concern and for those who are from Germany: it's a 
root-server at Strato (german company). Whoever runs FreeBSD on those 
webservers: and upgrade from 5.4-RELEASE to 6.0-RELEASE went easy and 
works like a charm (except of some struggles with dhclient)