Re: debian-installer status
On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 12:04:08AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Rob Bos wrote:
> > > - /dev is 3k bigger
> >
> > How practical would it be to compile devfs and include devfsd in the
> > bootfloppies?
>
> If it wasn't for that 33k binary plus config files, I'd say go for it,
> but we can't afford to bloat more right now.
After giving it some thought..
devfsd is just to simulate old-style dev entries - hda1 and the like.
You don't need it at all if you change your scripts to use the new ones:
hda1-4 on my system is
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4
like yuh. Since the device names are already abstracted out using variables,
it might not be too hard to forget devfsd completely. Then you only have the
added space required for devfs itself in the kernel
rbos@neko:~/linux/fs/devfs$ ls -l *.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rbos users 34370 Oct 8 19:49 devfs.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rbos users 7216 Oct 8 19:49 util.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rbos users 28552 Oct 8 19:49 base.o
The resulting bzImage might be larger, but not I think by a heck of a lot.
Those are unstripped and uncompressed in any case.
Oh, and speaking of kernels.. I've always wondered how much extra bloat is in
the kernels - if you put a Makefile directive stripping each object file at
some point, whether it'd still boot. Once I tried running strip on a vmlinux
image, but it didn't work for obvious reasons. Still, some chunks might be
reduced in size.
One thing I'd also _love_ to see someday is a set of patches to linux-kernel
that out-and-out removes anything not of concern to an embedded project -
SMP, for instance. That would also help.
kernels, especially 2.4 kernels, have a lot of stuff embedded systems don't
need - it's the curse of having a general OS.
Thoughts, anyway. I'm only browsing boot-floppies at this point and I
haven't gotten my hands dirty yet because I'm afraid of being one cook too
many so close to release :)
> > on my system, devfsd is 33k, 15k after gzip. This would let b-f get rid of
> > /dev/*, and could make for more reliable installation scripts (i.e, once
> > you've inserted the module you can forget about whether there's a dev entry).
>
> That is a good point indeed.
>
> > I'm not sure if bootfloppies is using a 2.4 kernel, though. Probably not,
> > considering the massive increase in size between 2.2 and 2.4.
>
> d-i is ignoring 2.2 -- 2.4 all the way.
>
> --
> see shy jo
>
>
> --
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--
Rob Bos, rbos@{sandwich.net,linux.com}, expert on everything and everyone
"The computer, while giving you tools, imparts neither skill nor talent."
--Dennis Powell
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