On 04/24/2012 02:33 PM, Rob Landley wrote: > There's plenty of low hanging fruit, yes. But I think linux-tiny is > actually going about it all wrong. My rant on the subject is here: > > http://www.mentby.com/rob-landley/what-happened-to-linux-tiny.html
I've read through this and agree completely. You can only get back to these sizes with an additive approach rather than a subtractive approach. As the kernel continues growing, the subtractive approach becomes less and less tractable. > And I'd assemble a catalog of hello world kernels with the standard code > to switch into protected mode (set up page tables, turn on the cache, > etc) and then print "hello world" via early_printk(). And then porting > chunks of linux to this in a granular way, with appropriate cleanups, > would be something other people could help with. :) That would be, IMHO, the right way to proceed. I'm interested in coming up with different mechanisms for allowing the specification of feature and code dependencies at compile-time, so that the abundance of corner-case code that we carry around today, that never gets executed, disappears completely. The current CONFIG and pre-processor stuff is fragile, and because it's so ugly, it doesn't allow the fine granularity needed to do a completely additive system properly. > I'd probably browbeat the device tree guys into helping me because this > should be entirely device tree based from day 1. Pretty much the FIRST > thing you add after "hello world" is a device tree parser, because that > tells you how much memory you've got and where it is. :) With device tree, you've probably blown your memory budget right there. :-) Using device tree just invites code that is not used on your target. -- Tim ============================= Tim Bird Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment ============================= _______________________________________________ Celinux-dev mailing list Celinux-dev@lists.celinuxforum.org https://lists.celinuxforum.org/mailman/listinfo/celinux-dev
