On Thu, 15 May 1997, Steve Quint wrote:

> I'm confused... Does this mean that the 1.2.1 distribution is not "current"?

No, it's a few months old.  Every couple of weeks, generally, there's a
new "-current" package created, containing effectively the same things
that 1.2.1 has, except with a new kernel, a new libkvm, and replacements
for the binaries that depend on libkvm (ps, top, probably vmstst, etc.).
Because libkvm, and thus ps and friends are heavily dependent on the
kernel and its internal structure, it takes very little kernel
modification to push them out of sync.  The most important part of
-current is the -current kernel, but the -current base package is helpful
because of the ps, etc.  Dunno about the rest.

> In the IPNAT documentation, the author mentioned that loadable module
> capabilities are built into NetBSD current, does that include 1.2.1?

Don't know.  My guess would be yes.

> Does that mean if I wish to use IPNAT with 1.2.1, I need to recompile a
> kernel; and if I use -current, I don't?

I'm not sure why you'd bother downloading the sources to the 1.2.1 kernel,
with -current around, although I would stick to a tarball of the sources
(since those are usually only created when the kernel is compilable and
working :-) rather than using sup to get the bleeding edge changes.  I
believe the word for the tarball source collections is "-current enough".
:-)

If you get a precompiled -current kernel, it would still be up to the
compiler whether lkm support was compiled in.  Looking around on puma,
Allen's copy of GENERIC configuration has lkm support turned on, so my
guess is that any GENERIC after support was added probably has it turned
on.  In fact, every config but MYSTERY and RAMDISK appears to.  Don't know
about custom configs like WORMHOLE, etc.  So basically, if it's a GENERIC
kernel (like the 1.2.1 dist kernel), try it, and if it doesn't work, it's
too old, and you should upgrade to a -current.


Hope that helps,
David