From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mike Haertel Message-Id: <200104092210.f39MAD904785@ducky.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] micro vs monolithic kernels In-Reply-To: <20010409211530.A859E19A09@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:10:13 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7c676b84-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 >you wouldn't expect to set up a full-blown windows nt >file server in a few hours and have it work. you wouldn't >(or at least shouldn't) expect to sit down with the red hat >box and have a linux system completely ready to go in a >few hours. because plan 9 is a research system while those >are commercial systems, you should expect even less in terms >of `works right out of the box'. I routinely set up fully configured FreeBSD boxes (using the distributed 4.2 cdrom, and manually editing local configuration into /etc) in about 25 minutes: 15 minutes to boot off the CD, partition the disk, make a file system, and extract a pretty complete set of distribution binaries and sources, and 10 minutes to edit files in /etc. It almost takes longer to set up the boxes and hook up all the cables and the network, than to install the OS. Plan 9 PC terminals are about as easy, but somewhat slower because of pathetic file system performance when extracting large bunches of files. I haven't tried to set up a full Plan 9 environment with auth, cpu, and file servers yet. When I was at Intel, I made a custom FreeBSD boot floppy that Unix-clueless coworkers could use to set up a full configured system in a completely automated fashion. It made intelligent decisions that allowed it to tolerate a variety of hardware configurations, and installed the bits over the network. It typically took 10 minutes from booting the floppy on an empty machine, to rebooting the fully configured system. The IT guys were amazed. My friends and I were amazed that they were amazed. For about two years the network of FreeBSD boxes that we ran ourselves was our favorite software development platform. A lot of Pentium 4 architecture work was done on that homebrew setup. Eventually the IT guys moved from NT to Linux and we stopped maintaining our own environment.