At 7:50 PM -0000 11/13/96, Grey Wolf wrote:
>Or, how about this:
>
>	- kernel boots, comes up with symtab loaded
>	- once minimal functionality is achieved (far enough to get to
>	  single-user mode), the kernel _immediately_ pages the symbol
>	  table out to swap space and frees that memory.
>	- /etc/rc calls a program to extricate the symbol table from
>	  swap space into /netbsd.nlist
>
>This, of course, fails if you have insufficient (or non-existent) swap
>space (or disk space on output, but if root is that full something's
>wrong anyway).
>
>Thoughts?  Comments?
>
>...or am I missing something here? [TM]

Could this be done by kvm_mkdb?  It could be modified to look at either
a kernel binary or something like a sysctl, and do the right thing either
way, which would keep the code from either bloating the kernel
or being replicated in multiple utilities.  (I am naively assuming that 
things that grovel through kmem actually _use_ /var/run/kvm_netbsd.db.)  
Once the db file was built, kvm_mkdb could tell the kernel to free up
the memory it was using for the symbol table.  

Just another random idea...

-- monroe