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From: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: WD Ethernet Card not found on warmboot
References: <1992Aug21.171828.14323@doug.cae.wisc.edu> <1992Aug24.085511.21092@autelca.ascom.ch> <veit.714671205@du9ds3> <1992Aug25.035924.29631@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Date: 25 Aug 92 06:36:44 GMT
Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung
Sender: @unidui.uni-duisburg.de
Message-ID: <veit.714724604@du9ds3>
Lines: 78
In <1992Aug25.035924.29631@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>In article <veit.714671205@du9ds3> veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de writes:
>>DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS?
>>Do you modify you hardware once a week, once a
>>day or so? UNIX is not that memory restricted like MessDos such that you
>>have to unload mouse drivers to get 3 bytes more in the lower 640K if you
>>have a large program to run. This loading and unloading considerably
>>decreased when I loaded a full featured OS/2, i.e. once the "best" configuration
>>was found, I modified CONFIG.SYS only for alteration of paths and
>>inclusion of enviroment variables (which has nothing to do with loadable
>>device drivers).
>This would be a good mechanism for bipartite SCSI drivers. This would let
>you have a single small kernel that would load a driver for a SCSI board
>based on the results of a probe.
You seem to carry your OS around, don't you? During installation I can
live with a large "GENERIC" kernel which has support for all possible devices.
After it has been relocated to the disk (IDE,SCSI or whatever) you can
eliminate the unnecessary devices, and get this "small" kernel.
>Another use would be loadable file systems, also with an initially small
>kernel.
Loadable filesystems is a good idea, if you frequently reconfigure your
disk layout. You may certainly have a UFS system, NFS, MFS, CDFS, and
DOS/FAT FS (the last to be written yet). I would call these the basic
facilities of the kernel. If you have no network card, not much RAM, no CDROM,
and/or no DOS partitions, you can live with the UFS only. Do you want to load
them whenever you need them, for instance if you want to run mtools the DOS FS
driver (server?) is loaded on line? Sounds like microkernel stuff such as
MACH.
>The ability to load system calls buys you, again, a standard kernel with,
>as an example, a kernel implementation of variable granularity locks (with
>intention modes).
>There are lots of things which it would be nice to be able to put in the
>kernel, use, and remove.
Which system calls do you want to make "loadable"? It is an interesting idea
to add features but it makes the software that rely on it unportable. I might
be persuaded that e.g. X11 needs some kernel optimizations to access the
I/O efficiently, this may or may not be a system call, and software that
needs to do fast I/O to a measurement device (who does realtime processing
with plain UNIX, however?), but this is not necessary for the general
purpose application. UNIX and BSD (just to distinguish) have a well-formed
and well-defined interface to the kernel, and this is the main advantage
of it compared to other so-called "operating systems" like DOS. Making
everything free configarble and loadable will soon start the same problems
as with DOS: no one really solves problems at the application level, everyone
hacks ("extends") the kernel instead. The "TSR" program is born again:
awkward, insecure, unreliable, *incompatible* to other software ("this
great vt100 emulation is unfortunately incompatible with the com-driver
of ABC, because they both share the same interrupt, which will be taken
from the sound card driver..."). Coming soon: QEMM-386 for 386BSD...gets most
memory out of your UNIX system ;-) (Excuse me, Quarterdeck).
> Terry Lambert
> terry_lambert@gateway.novell.com
> terry@icarus.weber.edu
>---
>Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
>or previous employers.
>--
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> terry@icarus.weber.edu
> "I have an 8 user poetic license" - me
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Holger
--
| | / Holger Veit | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
|__| / University of Duisburg | BITNET: veit%du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de@UNIDO
| | / Dept. of Electr. Eng. | "No, my programs are not BUGGY, these are
| |/ Inst. f. Dataprocessing | just unexpected FEATURES"