On 6/6/08 6:52 AM, "Geoff Steckel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Sometimes it matters to be small and sometimes fast. That is a decision >> made by the kernel hacker. Joe user does not make these decisions >> because he/she does not understand the overall impact. > >> As someone else who writes code for this fine os would say: removing >> drivers is pure masturbation. > > > I suggest that there are reasonable cases where a non-core-team > person would correctly want to remove unused drivers. Reasonable, maybe, corner cases, more likely than not. > For systems which must boot very quickly, removing unused drivers > whose probe routines cause significant timeouts can make a big > difference. Sometimes timeouts are the only way to check for an > I/O device behind a blind interface. For instance, checking > a floppy drive's seek time is a significant wait. This sounds like a corner case, how many times is this going to have and effect on Joe User? > For systems which are intended to run with little memory or which > are straining at architectural limits, 100K here and 100K there > can make quite a big difference in what applications can run. > Many drivers are over 150K when linked. When a megabyte or two > counts, removing 10 drivers could make a big difference. This is not the type of project that Joe User is going to be working on. It is the type of project that is going to go into the hands (hopefully) of a programmer or systems engineer who has the knowledge to do the diagnostics when something goes wrong building this system. This sounds like another corner case to me. > If the kernel code is well structured, the following must be true: > > Removing a driver which is essential to normal operation must > cause the kernel compile or link stage to fail. It does, at least in my experience. I was that young and stupid person who believed it was a badge of honor to run a custom kernel, now I believe it is a badge of honor to get your system functioning with the least effort expended, which is one of the reasons I have come to enjoy running OpenBSD. > > As an aside, I've been wondering what the heck named is doing to > initialize itself. It does many thousands of disk accesses for no > visible benefit and takes a very long time to do them. > I have never noticed a problem with this, and my DNS servers aren't exactly on top end hardware. In fact, they are on 300MHz machines that were rescued from the dumpster... If it is something that annoys you, why don't you do some profiling of the startup routine and see what you can optimize? Tim
