Hmm, I hope furuta or uchiyama speaks, but perhaps they are busy now...

>  > I agree with Chris - the gain of locator packing is small,
>  > we could well live without it.
> 
> And, without locator packing, boot-time reconfig is EASY.

To allow completely dynamic runtime reconfiguration,
not only unpacked locators, but also almost all information in files.*
file are needed for kernel.
For example, to add new device configuration entry dynamically,
kernel have to know what is the locators where the devices hangs, and
default values of the locators, and....

Newconfig project of japanese freebsd people tried to solve this
problem by extending NetBSD configuration mechanism dynamically.
(adding new drivers and new buses completely dynamically was also
 one of their goals.)

Their halfway result can be found on the following URLs,
comparing this with our config is not difficult, since this
was based on Dec 30, 1998 version of NetBSD's config.

www:
	http://www.jp.freebsd.org/newconfig/
cvsweb:
	http://www.jp.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/newconfig/usr.sbin/config.new/?cvsroot=freebsd-jp
ftp:
	ftp://daemon.jp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-jp/newconfig/
raw RCS file:
	ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/os/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-CVS-jp/newconfig/


This config(8) does unpack locators, and also outputs files.*
information to newioconf.c file. (though files.* information should
be accessed dynamically, not only statically linked to kernel)
--
soda