Components |
The Future VisionAfter CLAN is installed on the system it compiles a basic kernel that fullfills all of the system requirements. These may be found out using a hardware manager (such as MandrakeSoft's hard-drake) or explicitly. It then compiles a basic kernel and installs it. This requires a reboot. Afterwards, whenever the user needs a new module, he invokes CLAN (something like ``clan -e shell'') and installs this module by downloading it, verifying it for cryptographic validity (if necessary), compiling it and installing it. That's not all. If CLAN detects that the current kernel does not support this module it will accept the admin explicit or implicit permission to recompile the kernel with this option added, and install the new kernel as well. CLAN will require no bootstrapping. It would be able to prepare standalone source kernel packages that can be compiled without CLAN installed. And like I said earlier, installing a module will install all of its dependencies as well. CLAN will support multiple sources for modules (controlled by editing a text file), and will be able to handle source packages, binary packages and restrict each one to various architectures (i386, SPARC, Alpha, ARM) and sub- architectures (i386, i486, i586, i686). Some sources of CLAN will be able to carry non-GPL-compliant code and so the free software ideals will not be violated anywhere. I hope that CLAN will be able to play nice with the underlying package systems. I.e: build modules and kernels as RPMs on RPM based systems , as deb packages on Debian and derived systems, etc. CLAN will interact and play nice with system loaders such as LILO, GRUB and loadlin. Generally it will not install a new kernel unless explicitly instructed to All the kernel modules and subsystems will be available as CLAN packages and can be upgraded, configured and installed at home from a convenient CPAN or Apt like interface. |
Webmaster: Shlomi Fish. Email