Re: TCO, Microsoft XP Professional Versus FreeBSD
- From: talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michel Talon)
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:25:54 +0000 (UTC)
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That piece of sh!t is probably "kudzu" which is a "hardware probing tool"
from DeadRat.
Strange as bad knowledge of a system translates into angry comments about it.
I shall not comment about the problems caused by kudzu when you add a mouse or
some other stuff, but simply remark that Knoppix, which is highly praised for
its automatic hardware detection uses, of course, kudzu to do it. So what is
kudzu and how does it work? The first thing is that Linux kernels, at least
kernels shipped by distros are very bare bone, and unable to recognize most of
the hardware on the machine. On the other hands there is a huge number of
kernel modules able to drive this hardware. But how to load the correct
modules? It scans the various buses on the machine, such as the pci bus,
usb buses, etc. and discovers hardware on the machine. For example
pciconf -l on FreeBSD does that for the PCI bus. Then it uses a feature of
Linux kernel compilation, that when a driver is compiled, it also produces a
list of the hardware covered by it - the same sort of thing that is embedded
in a FreeBSD driver, but which is here exported so that user mode programs can
make use of it. For example in /lib/modules/2.6.17-1.2187_FC5smp i see a file
modules.pcimap containing indications such as:
snd-via82xx 0x00001106 0x00003058 ...
where these numbers are "vendor" and "device", that is the indications given
by the pci sacnning utility. This immediately indicates the correct driver
appropriate for this hardware, and so the correct kernel module to load.
This is *very* convenient, and would not harm FreeBSD at all to have. For
FreeBSD the problem is mitigated by the fact that the sytem ships with an
enormous kernel, able to drive most of the machinery on a given PC, and a
limited number of kernel modules need to be examined to drive further
hardware.
The second part of kudzu, much more objectionable, reacts to discovery events by
taking all sorts of actions, such as rewriting the xorg.conf file when you
insert a mouse, this is ways more troublesome than useful, in my opinion.
But all modern systems need a way to react to kernel events, and FreeBSD has
such a mechanism, devd. Needless to say, due to the high quality of the man
page, which contains little more than the syntax of comments, the only way to
discover what one can do with devd is trial and error.
--
Michel TALON
.
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