GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Mon Oct 21 11:33:21 UTC 1996

Neil J. McRae writes:
> Well if you're talking i386. For NetBSD/i386 work is being done to
> make gzip'ed kernels boot at thi time.

So the author told me. Thing is, he's as bad in some ways as I am.
Maybe it'll be done in two weeks, maybe not.

But whenever it's done, I'm sure it'll be great. BTW, I'm curious why some
people don't seem to like the idea. At the speed of modern systems, I
suspect that loading uncompressed off flopy isn't much faster (if at all)
than loading compressed off floppy and decompressing. In fact it may
be slower. I'd test it right now but my arms aren't 4 miles long, which
they'd have to be to reach the closest floppy drive on one of my NetBSDs...

Heh. I can just see it. gzip becomes a kernel function. Although that's not
really a joke- compressing filesystems aren't far off that mark...

/a