Subject: Re: *_TINY kernels
To: Joern Clausen <joern@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
From: Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>
List: port-i386
Date: 11/11/2007 17:22:43
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 05:21:51PM +0100, Joern Clausen wrote:
> I find GENERIC_TINY quite handy if you run into hardware issues during
> installation (on a not-so-mainstream machine, maybe). Then it's usually
> easier to start with GENERIC_TINY to see of there is *any* chance to
> install NetBSD at all, and then adding devices until something
> breaks.

Do you have experienced configurations where GENERIC and GENERIC_LAPTOP
+ using boot -d would not have helped?

> Maybe this does not justify distributing the compiled kernels,
> but the configuration files should be kept to describe a "minimal
> system".

I'm not sure whether it fills even that promise. Changes to GENERIC:
- optimised for size
- i386 and MATH_EMUL, the latter might be useful to add to GENERIC, the
former is considered to be essentially broken.
- PIC_DELAY (seems to be a dead option?)
- no red zone for userland (does the description even match for that?)
- much less mbuf clusters by default
- uses pccons instead of wscons in the case of INSTALL_TINY
besides the expected amount of removed drivers and options.

So I would say that it is mostly useless :-)

Joerg