Re: udp packet storms - ping death

[mch () sqwest bc ca (Mark C. Henderson)]

> eh? with solaris you an load/unload drivers and modules on the fly and
> configure the kernel _while_ it is running. this you ant do with sunos,
> also the svr4 kernel is far more scalable than the sunos one. the case isnt
...
Well, you _can_ actually load and unload modules on the fly into a
running kernel with Sun OS 4.1.x. By "modules" I mean device drivers,
system calls &c. The API for doing most of this may not be well
documented, but it is definitely there. Even works on an old Sun 3
running Sun OS 4.1.1. 

Looking at the man pages, you will notice that Sun OS 4.1.x has modload,
modunload, and modstat (called modinfo in Solaris 2.3); in fact there
have been some interesting security bugs involving this facility.

I've written loadable (via modload) system calls for both Sun OS 4.1.x
and Solaris 2.3. The process is essentially the same, although the names
of the hooks are all different.

However, you still have a good point, this loading facility is really
essential to Solaris 2.3 in a way that it wasn't essential to Sun OS
4.1.x. The way the kernel gets linked together on the fly and modules
get loaded automatically when a system call or driver is accessed, is
one of the things I like about Solaris 2.  In Sun OS 4.1.x, you need to
load the modules via modload, before you can use them. This isn't
really all that bad, you can just put the modload commands in
/etc/rc.local if you always want to be able to access to modules.