Subject: Re: Netpliance Iopener booted with NetBSD...
To: Jon Lindgren <jlindgren@espus.com>
From: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
List: current-users
Date: 03/23/2000 15:22:55
>>    % gzip -9 hello
>>    % ./hello.gz
>>    Hello world
>>    % uname -a
>>    FreeBSD something.graffiti.com 2.2.8-STABLE FreeBSD 2.2.8-STABLE #0: Tue Jan  4 11:46:22 EST 2000     root@something.graffiti.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/PAO  i386
>
>That is a pretty slick feature, and it doesn't _seem_ like it would be
>that hard to do, either.  This feature would be great for those of us with
>small disks; might it even improve performance over NFS rooted boxes?  It
>also allows us to fit more userland onto the "system on a floppy" type of
>setups (for simple routers, etc...).

it's standard freebsd stuff (under a beer licence), and while there's
no reason that *all* architectures shouldn't benefit from this neat
hack, it does require putting gzip in the kernel.  i can't say
anything about its stability (although i've never had a problem with
it), and since my old laptop doesn't have ktrace built into the
kernel, i cant say much for how it actually works.

it probably kills demand paging though.  :)

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