Re: Experiences with FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2

From: Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:59:31 -0400
Hi,

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk_at_mit.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Brett Glass <brett_at_lariat.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> My personal preference would be to place portions of the directory tree
>>> which contain critical configuration information and are not written in
>>> normal use -- e.g. /etc and /boot --
>>>
>> The problem with /boot on a dedicated partition is the the kernel,
>> since at least 8.x, is installed by default with a vast majority of
>> crap. That's all the .symbols, that 99% of FreeBSD users will never
>> uses.
>
> My recollection is that this is because kensmith forgot to take 'makeoptions
> DEBUG=-g' out of GENERIC when branching stable/8, and no one noticed until a
> couple of releases in, at which point it seemed consistent with POLA to just
> keep it there.  Unfortunately I am not having much luck digging through mail
> archives trying to confirm that.
> I don't remember whether the plan was to turn it off on stable/9 or not.
>
>>
>> Beside that, the auto-partitionner refuses to work on <1G drive, which
>> is really ridiculous...
>>
>> FreeBSD 9.0BETA2 bases + games fit in 310MB, crap taken out.
>
> Can you even buy a spinning disk less than 50GB these days?
>
The storage world is not limited to spinning hardware. Take a 512MB
CF, put it in a soekris box, and you got an embedded system capable of
doing a whole bunch of stuff.

Now, FreeBSD may no longer want to target such "niche" usage.

> If you have hardware of that nature, you are almost certainly going to want
> to customize other aspects of the system (and if it's an under-provisioned
> system, are you really going to be doing this customization in-place?), at
> which point removing the extra stuff is minimal extra work.  If a developer
> has to ask a user to do something (e.g. compile) in order to debug
> something, there is a huge hit in the response rate; having the symbols
> available in the general case can be helpful.
>
Then why don't you provide symbols for the whole system, including
binaries and libraries ? At least be consistent in your argument...

And, yes, I have patches for that.

 - Arnaud
Received on Mon Sep 26 2011 - 22:59:32 UTC

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