[gentoo-kbase] Re: Possible topic for kbase?

[Marc Blumentritt]

Sven Vermeulen schrieb:
> Patience is a good virtue... but I was also hoping for more input =) I'll
> try to put up some additional topics soon (first finish working on my
> floor), but we certainly need more input on this.

OK, with the update of gcc to 4.1, I worked again a lot with my Linux
system and I stumbled about some things, which I always wanted to know
more about. I do not know, if these topics are of interest or are
already explained in some detail elsewhere:

1.) What's a kernel, what is inside of it and why (userland vs. kernel)?
 I read somewhere, that over 50% of the kernel are drivers. Why are they
in the kernel and what's the rest? What is an initrd and when do you
need it? As far as I know, the Linux kernel is not the only choice with
Gentoo (BSD, Darwin, ?). What's the difference, advantages,
disadvantages? I know this is quite general.

2.) What is behind system (of emerge system)? How does portage know,
what packages are in system? I know, that the profiles define these, but
how does it work? What's the impact of USE flags on the system packages?
This is something I always wanted to know, but never really looked for,
so if there is already a good doc about it, sorry for the spam.

3.) How to get rid of cruft files? I removed a lot of old packages,
which I do not use anymore. By chance I found many files belonging to
these deleted packages on my system, e.g. in /etc/env.d I found
02distcc. Another example are old kernel modules in /lib/modules and
cleaning the portage tree. Are there good ways for finding these files?


Just a thought: Some guides like the gcc upgrade guide are "quick
solutions" to "specific problems". I think this fits quite good for the
kbase, so perhaps all guides like this should be moved/transformed to
the kbase?

Cheers,
Marc

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