Re: A newbie's view

[Rich Derr <rhd@webdesigngroup.com>]

On Thu, Jan 28, 1999 at 10:53:54PM -0000, Thomas Womack wrote:
> Is there anything in the current kernel architecture that makes it impossible to
> distribute vmlinux and a directory full of precompiled modules; when support for
> new hardware comes out, you download new modules to put in the directory, when a
> new version of the kernel comes out, you download a new vmlinux file, replace
> the old one and reboot?

   You just described Red Hat/Debian/etc. packages.  That's their job.

> I'd be prepared to accept a longer boot sequence and a larger vmlinux file, if
> it meant that the same vmlinux file would run on a wild variety of different
> hardware.

   Exactly what the distro maintainers try to do when they make their
generic kernels.  The modularization efforts in the 1.3 time were
largely to support this.  Now it would have been even better if kernel
version independant modules were possible, but still, this is minor.

   The kernel, like most packages, is *relatively* easy to compile if
you are inclined to do so.  Distributions exist partly (mainly?) to
allow you to trade off that flexibility for nice tidy packages.  I
don't think there is anything other than sound that is a big problem
that can't be handled nicely in a module.  (And I haven't really kept
up with 2.1 -> 2.2, so that may be better now than it was.  Still it
is a big public perception problem, IMO, regarding Linux on the
desktop.)

   When administering a farm of almost 200 machines I tarred /boot/*,
/lib/modules/VER/*, and /usr/src/linux-VER/include/*, sent them to the
machines, and ran lilo on each (that was automated of course).  No
trouble with that at all.  Admittedly most of them were very similar,
but several weren't and /etc/modules.conf was all they needed.
(Substitute however modules work today.)

   As another example, despite making new kernels all the time for some
machines, I never recompiled the Debian 1.2, Linux 2.0 kernel for my
laptop.  No need.  A generic kernel can be just fine if optimization is
not a concern.

-- 
Rich Derr, sysadmin                   Have ssh, Will Telecommute
Web Design Group   www.webdesigngroup.com   TEL: +1 312 951 6588
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