svn commit: r222980 - in head/sys: amd64/conf i386/conf

[Adrian Chadd]

btw, I just posted something similar to this on -arch.


adrian

On 11 June 2011 21:07, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:

> To me, this seems like the wrong direction.  Over the last decade, we've
> been trying to move away from conditional compilation of features to having
> them be loadable as modules.  The arrival of freebsd-update has only
> increased the pressure to take this approach: we want to avoid the need to
> customise kernel configurations as much as possible, so that users get
> binary updates in the common case.  As sound already fully supported being
> loaded as a module, and isn't needed to boot the system, it seems
> unfortunate that we'd move from loading it as a module to compiling it in.
>
> It seems like what we almost want is a default set of modules for
> loader.conf, which are automatically loaded (but not compiled in).  What we
> need to supplement that is a way to detect that modules *should* be loaded
> based on PCI IDs or similar, which could then trigger loading of the sound
> drivers, and other similar supplementary modules.
>
> While it seems like memory is "free" these days, that's not really the case.
> The base kernel footprint is quite observable in VM configurations, where
> it's common to configure quite low memory footprints -- 256M, 512M, etc, in
> order to improve VM density.
>
> It would be great if devd could subsume unmatched PCI ID attachment and
> reference a database of device drivers to figure out what to load.