David Schultz wrote: > Thus spake Terry Lambert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > John Baldwin wrote: > > > I doubt the usefulness of this. i386 kernels were just accidentally > > > broken for almost a month and a half without anyone noticing. > > > > People who build embedded devices that need to be supported in > > the field, and want to worry about their software, and not the > > platform it runs on, don't use -current, FWIW. > > Moot point. People who build embedded devices have separate, > usually modern, machines for building their kernels.
They also outsource their hardware, and have to provide a "golden master" CDROM. Internally, they also tend to want a build environment that is the same as the environment on their target platform, which they then use for cross-building on those "separate, usually modern, machines". What that boils down to is that you build a CDROM as if you were going to install on the target machine with a CDROM drive, even if the thing doesn't have a CDROM drive. Likewise, when you have a room full of appliance boxes that are rack-mounted, and have serial consoles, no CDROM, no floppy, or other removable media, the normal way you use to install an image is to boot up the current image, copy over the sysinstall from an already installed bootstrap system with a CDROM drive, and then NFS mount the CDROM, and run the sysinstall from the serial console, and lie and tell it the thing was mounted locally. This isn't like a build-out at an ISP or hosting company, where you can PXE everything because you're never going to ship anything to a customer site, so it's OK if some machine reboots, gets your boot server, and installs a new image (a disaster, if it happened to a closed box shipped to a customer site!). If you've never built a closed-box appliance, then you are probably not familiar with the operational differences you have to live with, compared to something like Yahoo or RackSpace, etc.. BTW: I would say the vast majority of FreeBSD installations are in open-box places like Yahoo, RackSpace, etc., where the boxes are all cloned out from a template, and never leave the premises or end up under the physical control of an end user. BUT... I would say that the *second-most* numerous set of FreeBSD installs is in closed-box systems from companies like Whistle, IBM, ClickArray, NetScaler, etc., who are building appliances (makes me wonder how many Soekris boxes are out there running FreeBSD). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
