On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:13:00PM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote: > On 08/13/2012 06:18 PM, Josh Triplett wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 03:39:54PM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote: > > In any case, do you object to the introduction of a Kconfig option at > > all, or to that option defaulting to off? In particular, would you > > object if the option only showed up if EMBEDDED, and defaulted to y? At > > that point, you could reasonably expect that most users and distros will > > have it enabled, so you'll be able to count on asking people to enable > > it and send you the output. Would that suffice? > > It's not one patch that I object to. It's a "pile" of them. > and when does it stop? or does it go on ad infinitum? Sounds like you're describing Linux development in general, and I think the same argument of "as long as people keep wanting to work on it" applies. > One could make options to make many lines of code configurable, > but that would hardly be the right thing to do IMHO. That seems like an argument better made about specific patches, rather than as a blanket statement ignoring the details of any particular patch. It seems reasonable to me to evaluate the tradeoff of complexity versus space savings for each patch. A complex patch that saves very little space certainly doesn't seem reasonable, and a simple patch that saves a pile of space seems very reasonable. In this case, the space savings seems reasonable enough to justify a patch that seems incredibly non-invasive. If the patch had a diffstat in the hundreds of lines, I'd understand the complaint. > > The patch itself seems incredibly straightforward and non-invasive to > > me; it just stubs out the global variable and lets GCC fold away all the > > code. > > > > At this point, the kernel is running out of major things to cut out to > > save space; getting from ~200k (the current smallest kernel possible) to > > much less than that will require a pile of patches that save anywhere > > a pile being how many patches (roughly)? At the moment, the team has a half-dozen patches in flight. How many more will happen in the future depends on how well the remaining parts of a minimal kernel partition into large, self-contained, removable chunks. In any case, could we perhaps pull this conversation back down out of the abstract and go back to discussing the specific patch in question? - Josh Triplett -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
