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From: gillham@andrews.edu (Andrew Gillham)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0 - a status report.
Date: 2 Nov 1994 01:19:12 GMT
Organization: Andrews University
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <396peg$f41@orion.cc.andrews.edu>
References: <38j31l$6nf@agate.berkeley.edu> <38to0m$k6d@fw.novatel.ca> <3937bd$l19@masala.cc.uh.edu> <395qr4$msb@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: edmund.cs.andrews.edu
In article <395qr4$msb@pdq.coe.montana.edu> nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>
>However, go back and re-read your article. Although your intent may not
>have been to 'flame', the tone of the article made it sound like that
>the FreeBSD folks didn't care and were spending our time on things that
>were unimportant. The fact of the matter is that to the FreeBSD folks
>ibsc2 emulatin is more important than MSDOS FS support. That isn't
>going to change, although it is hoped that the new msdosfs code should
>be more stable than the pcfs code in 1.1.
Here's my opinion: If you want MSDOSFS, run MSDOS... :-) :-)
Seriously though, I would *much* prefer the ibsc2 stuff than having
MSDOSFS actually work with a read/write mount. It is easy enough to
use MTOOLS if you have to. I actually have not had many problems
with MSDOSFS, so I may be biased! Wine support would be kind of neat,
but until Wine is "fleshed out" more, I'm for working on other stuff.
What I would like to hear more about, is the LKM-based device drivers
in FreeBSD v2.0! I would think they would be *the* way to go. What
we really need though is for FreeBSD & NetBSD to use the *same* LKM
drivers, so the master-hacker-device-driver-writer only has to create
one LKM for both OSes. (or source for one LKM at least, I'm not
advocating object-only drivers)
Some questions:
1. Which drivers are "LKMed"
2. Can "boot device" drivers be LKMs with some sort of
"pre-linking" or "binding" of the LKM to the kernel file?
i.e. bootstrap loads /*bsd, jumps into kernel which then
initializes LKM drivers that are bound into the /*bsd file,
which then probe/attach/mount the root device?
3. Is #2 a stupid idea? Seems like it would be slick for
creating a "kernel link kit" similar to how the XFree86
server link kit works. For a binary install, you wouldn't
even need the kernel source, just the "core", the LKMs and
the "binder" utility.
4. What does the "LKM.conf" file look like? Can IRQ/PORT/etc
be specified there and/or on the modload commandline?
Hmm, well that's enough silly questions for now.
-Andrew
--
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Andrew Gillham gillham@andrews.edu
LAN/WAN/Netware/Unix Analyst gillham@whirlpool.com
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