[rescue] Linux Luserisms (was: secondary market storage?)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Robert Rose wrote:
> And what's wrong with having to rebuild a kernel?  IMBADB [*], I think you 
> can never really grok Unix until you've gone through and built yourself the 
> perfect kernel with no extraneous drivers, modules, options, etc, 
> specifially for your individual host.  There's a sense of achievement that 
> you just don't get with a click-n-drool interface or these new-fangled modules.

Oh, there's nothing -wrong- with it.  I just appreciate the convenience of
being able to, for example, define two additional serial ports by calling
/sbin/setserial instead of wating three hours for the same POS to rebuild the
kernel.

I mean, adding comletely new hardware is a perfectly justifiable case to
rebild the kernel--if it's not in the system, its driver shouldn't be hogging
kernel memory.  But, adding an instance of an existing device...why should that
require anything more than (at most) redefining some bootloader variable and
rebooting?

It's not that I don't build my own kernels; it's the first thing I do when I
get the OS installed and running.  I just don't see why each instance of each
device has to be precompiled into the kernel, when the driver should only be
loaded once, anyway.  I'm sure someone has a very good reason for it, but
I'll cast my once-in-a-decade vote for convenience this time.

--Jonathan