Kernel in smaller ROMs, salvation in sight?

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Mon Aug 11 00:31:08 CEST 2003


ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Adam Agnew wrote:
> 
> > It seems like pretty good news for the linux kernel as a bootloader route
> > that effots are being made to get the kernel smaller when necessary.
> 
> good, because long term, that is still a preferred choice for me.

Me as well.  I think I want to see if I can get a 2.6.0 kernel to run
on x86 without an mmu.  Potentially that could be very nice size
reduction wise.

And to really get it useful I need to put in the extra work to get
kexec into the kernel.  I'm almost there, but I am currently distracted
with freebios2 and the Opteron port.

Now that there is a good general purpose solution to small 256KB ROMS.
I don't feel bad about pursue a solution that is only useful for 512KB
ROMS and above.  A very compelling reason is that hardware is getting
increasingly interesting, and needs more drivers etc.

Though given how things are going I am half tempted to do things like
write a mini TCP stack that is closer to 10K than 100K.

Eric




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