Re: /proc/config idea

[Michal Jaegermann <michal@harddata.com>]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 05:39:19PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> 
> if the distro/sysadmin _always_ installs the kernel the 'right way' then
> the difference isn't nessasarily that large, but if you want reliability
> on any system it may be worth loosing a page or so of memory (hasn't
> someone said that the data can be compressed to <1K?)

After throwing away in a Makefile rule all "is not set" lines, as they
are trivially recoverable with 'make oldconfig', what is left for an
avarege kernel compresses to something like 500 bytes.  Quite a bit
of space left on this one page if you need more extensive .config.
'zcat /proc/config.gz' works just fine.

As most kernels around are NOT installed "the right way" I found that in
practice separating configuration information from a kernel image is not
even close to be semi-reliable on a longer run.  Those who say
"installation script", and similar things, assume that people compile
kernels for themselves.  This is undoubtely true for folks on this list;
this does not start to approximate the situation in general and, it
seems, that we really want it that way. :-)

BTW - /sbin/installkernel, as seen in practice, is not even correct for
a general case with x86; not to mention other architectures.  Writing
something like /var/log/config from "init data" during a bootup could be
another solution which does not take any kernel memory and still keeps
all this information attached to a kernel image itself.  OTOH we have
all these tons of strings which show in /proc/pci output and somehow
these do not cause such huge opposition.  Yes, I know that 'lspci' was
supposed to replace that; but it did not.

  Michal