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Old 31st March 2009
eztiger eztiger is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 4
Default FreeBSD 7 i386, PAE and kernel modules

Hi folks,

I've just got a new box with 4GB physical RAM.

I have an existing server running a bunch of jails that I want to migrate over to this new server - this existing server is running FreeBSD 6.2 i386.

As such the new server is also running i386 otherwise I'm going to run into problems running my 32 bit jail binaries on a 64 bit kernel.

Obviously I'm not seeing the full amount of RAM in the new server and won't do until I install a PAE kernel.

However the handbook advises (well actually flat out says not to!) against loading kernel modules into a PAE kernel and indeed the PAE template config file has

makeoptions NO_MODULES=yes

Which kindof gives that away. So far so good - unfortunately :

Id Refs Address Size Name
1 8 0xc0400000 97f830 kernel
2 1 0xc0d80000 164e8 geom_mirror.ko
3 1 0xc0d97000 6a2c4 acpi.ko
4 1 0xc6d0b000 22000 linux.ko

I need those modules. acpi is taken care of in the PAE config :

device acpi

How do I do the other two?

I need geom_mirror (for the root gmirror disk) before the kernel loads - its currently being loaded in /boot/loader.conf.

I also want the linux support.

How can I build them statically into the kernel such that they both work? Is it as simple as a device line in the kernel config? i.e

device linux
device geom_mirror

Also does geom_mirror depend on anything? I'm guessing not as nothing else seems to be loaded but :

# ls /boot/kernel/geom* | wc -l
64


There are an awful lot of geom modules in my existing kernel compile and some of them sound very generic - like they may be needed all the time (geom_label, geom_bsd for examples)

Any tips from someone whose done this before?
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