On Wednesday 04 June 2008 05:33:53 Adrian Bunk wrote: > Does the linux-tiny approach of adding a kconfig variable for each 5kB > of code actually make sense? I'm asking since an exploding amount of > kconfig variables and their interdependencies have a not so small > maintainance impact in the long term. Complexity is a cost, you have to get good bang for the buck when you spend it. > And I'm wondering whether it's the best approach for reaching > measurable results. When I first started stripping down systems to make embedded masquerading routers back in the late 90's (before linksys came out), I started with a Red Hat install and removed lots and lots of packages. That's the approach we're taking today, and I can say from experience that it's not sustainable. I then wandered to a Linux From Scratch approach, building a system that had nothing in it but what I wanted. Starting from zero and adding stuff, rather than starting from Mt. Crapmore and removing things until the shovel broke. Someday I want to do the same for the Linux kernel. When I started building systems instead of carving them out of blocks of distro, I started with a "hello world" root filesystem, and I want to make a "hello world" kernel. Start with just the boot code that does the jump to C code, only instead of start_kernel() in init/main.c have it call a hello_world() function that prints "hello world" to the console using the early_printk logic, then calls HLT. And does _nothing_else_. Then add stuff back one chunk at a time, sstarting with memory management, then the scheduler and process stuff, then the vfs, and so on. So I know what all the bits do, and how big and complicated they are. And I can document the lot of it as I go. Unfortunately, as a learning experience, I estimate this would take me about a year. And I haven't got a spare year on me at the moment. But it remains prominently on my todo list, if I decide to start another major project. (Maybe after I get a 1.0 release of FWL out.) > My gut feeling is that the influence of this kind of linux-tiny patches > is hardly noticably compared to the overall code size development, but > if you have numbers that prove me wrong just point me to them and I'll > stand corrected. The whackamole approach is never going to turn Ubuntu into Damn Small Linux, and it ignores the needs of the people who don't want the /proc hairball but _do_ want a ps that works. Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
