What size would it have to be under to be useful?
What exactly is being measured? bzImage?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric W. Biederman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Jeremy Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 12:50 AM
Subject: Re: OOPS! Ron is Wrong! Re: should linuxbios turn on PCI devices in
general?
> "Jeremy Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > Warning: this post does not contain the working code requested :)
> >
> > ...but working on the 2.5.6 ide subsystem,
> > I notice that just ide.o is ~48k... almost as big as linuxBIOS itsself.
> > drivers/ide/*.o is like 512k. I'll try using the "old" hd.c driver...
> > perhaps it's smaller
>
> We have much smaller code in LinuxBIOS already.
>
> > In trying to strip down the Linux kernel, has it been tried to configure
it
> > without even some of the stuff we take for granted?
>
> It comes to right about 256K compressed with nothing compiled in.
> Try it.
> That makes it useless for fitting in a ROM.
>
> > Like unix domain
> > sockets, or maybe even networking? (for disk boot only)
> > I mean, actually do some development, making some extra config options
> > to turn stuff off... remove elevator code...
> >
> > I'm guessing nobody has gone far enough to say for sure it's impossible,
> > right?
>
> Not far enough to say it's impossible. But far enough to say it
> probably isn't worth while.
>
> > I would start by configuring a minimal kernel, compiling, and breaking
down
> > by elf section name and directory... let me see...
>
> >
> > make mrproper ; make dep; make bzImage
> > for i in {.text, .data, .bss, __ex_table, .rodata, .data.init,
.setup.init }
> > ; do
> > find linux -name *.o -exec objdump -h {} | grep $i | cut ....
>
> Try it. I think it might be possible to get the core down smaller but
> that is currently an insane amount of work. I'd like to see it, but...
> For me it is more productive to enhance etherboot.
>
> Eric
>
