On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 05:00:03PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> I am not sure if my opinion has much meaning. I certainly am
> not a fan of the gazillion kernel image packages for the same
> architecture, complete with the corresponding header, doc, and source
> binary packages; I have never been convinced of the ROI (if I may
> stretch the term) or compiling for k6/k7/i386/i586/i686/i686smp
> separately justifies the utility for the users. But, as author of
> kernel-package, I may be biased about the simplicity of and rationale
> for everyone compiling their own, tailor made, kernel.
FWIW Manoj, I agree on this front. My recent experience with reinstalling
woody on galen (this box) indicates that we're focusing on the wrong
things with our pre-packaged kernels. First let me say that galen cannot
even boot 2.2.x, so I guessed the default boot floppies would be useless
before I tried them. It was so.
The Woody base CD (URL escapes me, but I don't recall that it has ever
been announced to this list anyway) had a 2.4.18 kernel to boot from, and
that got a little further, but still fell short of actually working. It
lacked Andre's IDE patch, which people with newer controllers cannot boot
without. And the fbcon was so slow that I was reminded of the days of
1200/2400 baud modems. I'm serious, it was really that slow!
Obviously I've applied Andre's IDE patch to get myself up and running, and
fbcon was made quite speedy by the low-latency patch. I think Debian's
kernel people need to quit worrying about supporting all of the native
optimizations for each and every sub-family of the IA32 processor and
worry instead about questions like whether or not the standard kernels are
going to work reasonably well for people.
Most people will recompile their kernels, that's a given. And most dists
apply many patches to their kernels to make sure that the things their
users need are always there. Granted most of them go way overboard, but
I'm unable to think of any other binary packaged dist besides Debian which
ships its kernels without any patches unless they're needed to get the
thing to compile. I've never understood this.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> You expected a coherent reply?
<mdorman> I'm a gnus person myself. It's an editor! It's a floorwax!
It's a dessert topping!
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