Re: why is gif disabled on RPI?

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

> I just tried to set up a v6 tunnel on an RPI1 running netbsd-8, which
> seemed to me to be a perfectly normal thing to do.  It failed, with
> EINVAL, and on reading the kernel config I see gif and all other
> pseudo-interfaces are commented out.
>
> I see a lot of these in GENERIC.common, but not gif.   A number of these
> are dups with what is in RPI.
>
> Of course, gif is what I wanted, but it seems small, on the order of
> 10KB, and it seems that being a network appliance is a fairly common
> thing.

I noticed this, too, and think it's pretty silly. Even a machine with 256 
megs (original Pi) isn't going to need these kinds of trimmings.

> I of course realize it's easy for me to make a new kernel, and to set up
> to load the gif module at boot (but I can't later due to secmodel).
>
> I wonder if anyone would object to cleaning up RPI by removing things
> that are in GENERIC.common (NFC). Also to moving gif to GENERIC.common,
> adn turning it on.

I think it's an excellent idea.

Really, though, I think there's room for improvement for all kernel config 
files. If a device has USB, for instance, why not include all working USB 
devices? Why have a different default for one platform than for others? 
Likewise for SCSI, or network pseudo-devices, et cetera.

I can see why we have exceptions. My VAX has USB, but we don't support 
loading kernels larger than 4 MB, so we don't include all USB devices. 
Ports like ARM, though...

John