Jeff Mahoney schreef:
Oddball wrote:
Hi,
Some filosophy....
Maybe i do not make any sense at all, but i am thinking on this for a long time now.
When inspecting a hardware system, before installation, communication is going on between hardware detection and all devices on the board, to find out which drivers are needed, to ensure optimal working of the machine with the os. This image, of 'what' exactly is in the particular system, is the template to start the machine and the os, to look at the list of modules to be started. ToDo list.
My thought is that what is nessesary should be there, but what is not needed, should not be.
So the 'image', can be used to start-up the system, without looking for everything, if it is still there, because it 'knows' everything is there, because why would that change, but if it does, a hardware config module would be handy, to start hardware detection, of to 'mention' the device manualy. (i am not talking about hotplugging devices, but another video-card, or soundcard, or a pcie-usb card, something like that.)
This way, a very light startupfile would be able to start up the system, which would save an oughfull lot of actual startup time.
This eeepc901 has usb dvd-drive. Startup 'waits' for the device, whetter it is plugged in or not. Why would it wait if it knew the drive was not plugged in? (in this case, to boot from another device would be activated by pressing esc, during first startup, before/during bios invoke screen..)
So there is two things: 1) hardware that is 'allways' around, and 2) hotplugging devices. Checking the usb-busses, and other removable cardbusses are checked, and expected to find something connected.
After a few boots, software can 'know' the routine of what is used to power-up.
To install, all modules need to be present, but only those needed, have to be installed. That is what i actualy mean. Not carry load, that is not needed. The os logs. It can know which apps are used, and which not. It can unload those, that are never used, and started manualy when nessesary, if instructed to do so.
This 'tuning' cannot be done by regular users without extensive study, but the os can and should know, and act accordingly.
Sophistcated software serves the user, as best as it can.
I think there might be a misunderstanding on how device discovery actually works. During installation, there's a bit of poking around, but that's not how the kernel does device discovery.
The kernel doesn't look for e.g. a new video card - it goes down the busses, enumerates what's there, and issues events to userspace to load the appropriate drivers for that hardware. The boot process only loads drivers for common hardware for which there isn't any autodiscovery, like cpufreq. If it travels the busses, it should find minipciewifi card, how exactly can it be 'un'-ignored?
So, for example, if you booted initially with a USB hub and a lot of devices attached to it - if the hub isn't there, it's not going to go out looking for those devices. It'll stop on the last bus. Loading a specific set of drivers unconditionally might speed things up negligibly since it won't need to call out to udev, but the kernel still needs to enumerate all the buses on the system to actually bind the driver to a specific device, and then call out to userspace again. very clear discription!
The modules are present on disk, but they're not actually loaded if they're not used. So, yes, they do take up disk space but they don't actually affect the system at runtime otherwise. The diskspace is hardly an issue these days... but startup time is.
That said, for a truly minimal system like Jan mentioned with JeOS, that's not what you want either. There are core modules that will nearly always be used like TCP/IP, the SCSI layer, etc, but some of the more esoteric devices and protocol could probably be split out into smaller packages that can be uninstalled easily. why not?
Bear in mind that openSUSE is a general purpose OS and we want to make it work as expected for as many users as we can. If someone new to Linux buys some device and plugs it in, it should work without being prompted to install additional drivers. Making it possible for advanced users to remove things they don't want shouldn't sacrifice the ease of use for beginners.
-Jeff
Thnx for enlightening my vision.. Very open and straightforward attitude btw. The last alinea completely mirrors my vieuw -- Have a nice day ;) Oddball aka M9. OS: Linux 2.6.29-56-default i686 Huidige gebruiker: oddball@EEEPC-901-ROB Systeem: openSUSE 11.1 (i586) KDE: 4.2.2 (KDE 4.2.2) "release 110" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+help@opensuse.org