[Fwd: What do people think about not installing a stripped /kernel ?]

[Maxim Sobolev]

Let me clarify it down: it is only applies to HEAD, that is, unstable 
branch, which can be inheretedly buggy. STABLE/RELEASE doesn't really 
need this feature. This dismisses the following objections:

1. HDD size constrains: nobody really want to run unpatched HEAD on CF 
or the like, since with HEAD you are expected to re-compile more than often.

2. / partition size: anybody running HEAD is expected to allow this 
accomodate debugging kernel.

3. Additional slowdown: since it is adds up to 10 seconds (I bet that 
even less on a modern system) who cares? This is HEAD, so that it is 
expected to be sub-optimal performance-wise.

4. CD size constrains: again - it's for head. We don't put HEAD on CDs, 
except snapshots, but they generally go without packages.

-Maxim

Alex de Kruijff wrote:
>>-------- Original Message --------
>>Subject: What do people think about not installing a stripped /kernel ?
>>Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:12:00 -0700 (PDT)
>>From: Matthew Dillon <dillon at apollo.backplane.com>
>>Newsgroups: dragonfly.kernel
>>
>>The only cost is disk space... e.g. 3MB stripped kernel verses 16MB
>>debug kernel.  But the debug info isn't actually loaded into memory so
>>the kernel load time and memory overhead is the same as with the stripped
>>version.
>>
>>The issue is bug reports and kernel core dumps.  I can't count the number
>>of times I have had to carefully instruct people to retrieve their
>>kernel.debug's for bug reporting purposes.  And even my own debugging 
>>would be more convenient if I didn't have to save off a separate copy of
>>the debug version of the kernel.
>>
>>What I'm thinking of doing is having the installkernel target install the
>>debug version rather then the stripped version unless told to install
>>the stripped version with a new option, e.g. 'options INSTALL_STRIPPED'.
>>We would ship full debug GENERIC kernels instead of stripped kernels.
>>i.e. we aren't getting rid of the ability to install a stripped kernel,
>>we just aren't making it the default any more.
>>
>>What do people think?
> 
> 
> There are a couple downside.
> 
> 1. Performance issues. (i.e. Longer startup time)
> 2. There's more kernel to go in to the memory.
> 3. The root partition need to be bigger.
> 
> FreeBSD 5.0 was slow when it came out of the box. So I think its a great idee for the prerelease but bad the releases them selfs.