Anand Arumugam wrote: > what is the > normal environment that is used by most of the kernel hackers and > developers? do they have a dedicated pc for this work and have a > separate pc for other uses? or just create a partition in the hard drive > and use this partition for kernel related development? I guess it really depends on what sort of kernel development you do. If it's something that doesn't need access to the hardware, for instance a new filesystem, you can get away with a virtual machine in VirtualBox or KVM or Xen. On the other hand if you need access to the metal, when writing device drivers for example, you're better off having a dedicated machine since you are likely to experience frequent reboots. To give an example - I work, edit code, browse documentation, etc on my workstation. That one hardly ever gets rebooted. The code I write for a given project is in a NFS-exported dir and that dir is mounted on a one of my test systems where I compile and test it. If it works - good, if it breaks - never mind. All I need is to reboot or powercycle the test machine and in the mean time, on my workstation, fix the problem and get ready for another test. That means that my work environment (open files in editor, open documentation PDFs, etc) is not disturbed if the test system crashes. And it also means that all my code is in one place, not scattered among many different systems. I don't need a keyboard and screen for each system - all of them are networked and most of the time I ssh to them from the comfort of my workstation (using a dedicated password-less ssh key to make it even simpler). Actually some of my embedded boards only have a serial console and no network, but that's a whole different story. My test systems are often low-spec machines that you can buy 2nd hand for a few bucks from ebay or similar sites. Not a big investment for the comfort you gain from having a dedicated test system. I'm sure other developers prefer different setups. This is merely a way that works for me. HTH, Michal -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
