Re: Huge Kernel

[David Mosberger <davidm@napali.hpl.hp.com>]

>>>>> On Fri, 20 Dec 2002 18:51:26 -0500, "Francois Page" <francois@jvminfo.com> said:

  Francois> Hi !  I'm new to ia64, so my question will may be stuppid
  Francois> for you....  I'm using an HP rx5670 with Itanium 2 cpu.
  Francois> My problem is when I recompile a kernel, whatever option I
  Francois> tried, the kernel is always huge. (Kernel version 2.4.20)
  Francois> I mean about 24mb gzip compressed instead of about 2.7mb
  Francois> from the one comming with the debian distro (kernel
  Francois> 2.4.19) What I did wrong ?

  Francois> I tried to compiled 2.4.20 with the config file that come
  Francois> with the debian distro, it's larger than mine !

  Francois> The only thing wrong when I compiled my 2.4.20 it's I'm
  Francois> not able to do a "make boot", I got compilation error. I
  Francois> need to compress and move the kernel by hand then do
  Francois> elilo.

  Francois> If someone as a clue for me, it will be really appreciate
  Francois> !

I don't know why "make boot" fails, but it sounds like you didn't
strip the debug info before compressing the kernel.  From the Makefile:

	objcopy --strip-all vmlinux vmlinux-tmp
	gzip vmlinux-tmp
	mv vmlinux-tmp.gz vmlinux.gz

If you do this, the kernel should be a reasonable size.
Alternatively, drop -g from CFLAGS in the top-level Makefile (if you
_really_ don't want debug info).

	--david