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
=============================

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