Various kinds of System reloads 2360

Not really. This "kernel linking ritual" that all mundane sysadmins had to go through was a hbuttle. One of those things that needs to be relegated to history.

That kernels really can (re)configure themselves is a Good Thing.

(Dynamic reconfiguration seems to be the next big event in Linux, after they got devices sorted out in 2.4, and smp-scaling in 2.6.)

Don't worry about the people getting ready for what you call "Bit God" status (I would tend to call it hackerdom).

They will get to a point where they download the kernel from cvs; and do daily rebuilds. It isn't too touch once you are motivated for it. The point is to get them there without scaring them too badly first.

The systems of today are mightily intimidating to dig into, just because there is so much stuff in it. Looking at a Linux box, it has a window system, a network system, 4 different kinds of IPC, 7 shells, a dozen scripting languages, another dozen compiled ones and half a dozen languages that are difficult to clbuttify. It has 3-5 text rendering engines, and ditto many graphics rendering ones; there are half a dozen buses in the system; and there are many storage subsystems.

Just have the opening to the hood exposed, and they will come.

In the mean time, let them deal with stuff in a natural progression, and let them learn things in a reasonable progression. They should really have learned some lessons about building&linking and should know the basic inns&outs of a debugger before they embark on a custom kernel build.

Both. Including memory. Prime was the epitome of outboarding stuff, moving separate cpus into everything, and these had to be configured and most needed a download of code. Many allowed terminal sessions the Primos side.

There was no coherence between implementations though.

There is a reason Prime is no longer an IT company.