-----Original Message-----
From: "Linda Walsh"
Seconds against hours.
Seconds? to Hours? for a user to regenerate their kernel in the field? Factory could stick w/initrd, but my suggestion was to allow users to optimize that to direct boot by installing & running a direct boot package, that compiles their kernel with needed mods built-in. How can that take hours? The only diff is that instead of those modules going onto an initrd they are built-in, and then there is no need for an initrd to boot. Compiling kernel locally, a few minutes... likely <5 on a slow machine. Mine takes 129 seconds w/335 loadable modules, on a 2.8GHz machine -- but it doesn't generate an initrd -- that usually adds an extra 25% last I did it. ------------- (Rackspace webmail, sorry for no quote formatting) Back on SCO, from Xenix to the last OpenServer, (I never used Unixware except in the form of I played with OSR6 long enough to hate it) kernels were generated by linking modules into the kernel and it was easily as reliable as current initrd generation, and easily faster. Even on really ancient hardware it only takes a couple seconds. And no initrd. So the compile-time argument is not ultimately necessarily much of an argument. Yes it takes hours (MANY, on my vaio P) to compile an entire linux kernel plus modules from scratch. But for the purposes of distribution support and administration, a custom kernel doesn't necessarily have to entail that. For linux there is already dkms as has been mentioned, and it's reasonably fast, compiling just a single module. And the proof of the basic idea of module linking and custom kernels in users hands has already been proven viable since at least 20 years ago. By support nightmare I just meant support people having to wonder what you did to your kernel as one of the first steps in every single question about anything. I love the _option_ of an initrd. Having an entire system loaded by the bootloader from a single file via tftp/pxe and running entirely in ram, thus giving you a way to skip right over all kinds of breakage, is "Real Damned Handy(tm)" sometimes. But it's anti-progress to make it a requirement. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org