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SubjectRe: Building .config into the kernel
Date
"A week of mondays ago Alan Cox wrote:"
>
> > with an uptime of 120 days, and the admin you're helping doesn't know
> > which kernel he booted.. It's also not available at boot time, which is
>
> If the admin doesnt know which kernel he booted, he hasn't got symbol tables
> or .config data. In those cases I wouldnt even bother debugging it much

It's often a hard fight to find which server booted what kernel from
where and whether it still has it even for a _good_ admin. There isn't
room for more than one or two good admins per institute. The rest will
be helpless. The good ones may not be physically present, or the
machine may be only accessible in limited ways (I often lose all contact
except for the nfs mount of their /etc's on my machines, for example,
when A.Useless wrecks nis, misconfigures dns by wrapping a comment line,
or other miserable miscreant thing, but the mount leaves me just enough
leeway to be able to get in and fix things).

It's ridiculous not to waste 4k of space on a list of config options in
memory on 256MB servers holding up 30 client machines. It saves time and
avoids confusion. It helps bug reporting too .. telephone conversation:
"is your kernel configured for firewalling? .. I don't know! .. please
zcat /proc/config.gz | mail me@here please .."

uh .. flame off. Not that it was very hot.

Peter

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