Time to get busy!

[Tomas Arvidsson]

On Mon, 5 May 1997 Dwight Hughes (dhughes@intellinet.com) wrote:

> RedHat seems to be highly regarded for the quality of their product
> and their support.

They are one of the few (S.u.S.E. and Caldera being the other ones I
believe) who gives support on a commercial basis for their product,
i.e. pay them and you get support. Slackware, Debian, etc, relies on
voluntary efforts and can't give the same kind of support.

> FreeBSD is touting "dynamically loadable kernel modules" at runtime
> (for "new file system types" and "binary emulators") and
> "compatibility modules" which they are using primarily for binary
> compatibility between FreeBSD and most of the rest of the Un*x clone
> universe -- would these be useful to us in the beginning or for the
> LispVM effort?

Probably.

> If so, are comparable capabilities available in the Linux OSs now?

If FreeBSDs' "dynamically loadable kernel modules" are what I think
they are then Linux has a similar system although on Linux the modules
can and are being used for almost anything that previously were part
of a static kernel structure (mostly drivers of different kinds).
When you compile a Linux kernel you decide what should go into the
kernel, become a dynamically loadable module or be left out of the
kernel all together. When you need a module you load it "by hand" or
have a daemon do it for you automagically when you request a service
that needs a particular module. This might be that same thing that
FreeBSD have got - I don't know.

-- 
Tomas Arvidson         *** md94-tar@nada.kth.se * d91tar@csd.uu.se  ***
                       *** http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~md94-tar ***