Some ways to save space on the floppies

[Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au>]

pipe-progress is the only non-busybox binary in bootfloppy-initrd,
pipe-progress is very simple and could easily assimilated by busybox.

Having only one binary in the first initrd would open the possibility of
compiling it statically, this would eliminate the requirment for
ld-linux.so.2 which is 89kB on i386.

I think static binaries may be marginally smaller than a binary +
dynamic library (after library reduction) due to some library overheads,
it is a very marginal savings though i think.


A static busybox could be a good way to begin to use uclibc which is a
lot smaller than glibc.


There is duplication of functionality in the busybox provided in
bootfloppy-initrd and floppy-initrd, the busybox in floppy-initrd could
be reduced in size by making the two versions of busybox co-exist,
perhaps by renaming the first on busybox-bootfloppy.

I havent tried this in practice but i cant think of any reason why it
wouldnt work.


If floppy-initrd is compressed with bzip2 instead of gzip it would save
85kB, adding bzip2 support to "busybox-bootfloppy" would add about 7kB
to the binary size, less after compression.





Glenn