Message-Id: <199509301854.LAA29955@aslan.cdrom.com>
To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
Cc: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org>, hackers@freebsd.org,
        jkh@time.cdrom.com
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Sep 1995 14:48:25 EDT."
             <199509301848.OAA05922@etinc.com> 
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 11:54:16 -0700
From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org>
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

>>Fixing LKMs (something even people with more than 4MB want) should take
>>care of this.
>>--
>
>It really shouldn't. I think that  what is needed is a "bootload" kernel and
>a "generic"
>kernel. While its ok for the generic kernel to be large, the "bootload"
>should allow someone to 
>load the system and compile (or load) a custom kernel, which can be much
>smaller. There's no
>reason why the generic kernel has to be used on the boot floppy.

I respectfully disagree.  ;-)

The "boot kernel" should have enough glue to load LKMs for anything from
NFS support to your favorite SCSI driver off of the boot floppy (or even
additional floppies).  The LKM for device drivers should have an entry
point that lets you determine presence of the hardware before committing
the whole module to memory.  In this way, a "generic" boot floppy could
cycle through all LKMs asking them to do the probe and only load the full
module (or perhaps unload the module in the event of failure) if the probe
is successful.  In this way, the only way you'd not be able to install
in a low memory configuration is if you had everything but the kitchen
sink in your machine.

I want to move toward a more dynamic system where
in most cases you don't have to recompile the kernel to get the right
configuration for you system.  LKMs seem the natural solution.

>Dennis
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Emerging Technologies, Inc.      http://www.etinc.com
>
>Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For
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--
Justin T. Gibbs
===========================================
  Software Developer - Walnut Creek CDROM
  FreeBSD: Turning PCs into workstations
===========================================