[LinuxBIOS] [Fastboot] Re: [Kboot-general] Re: small 64bit initrd

[Eric W. Biederman]

Steve Gehlbach <steve at nexpath.com> writes:

> If you could provide a roadmap on how to do this, or even better have a chance
> to do it yourself for 2.4.27+ (2.4.32 would be great), that would _really_ be
> useful.
>
> 2.4 is a smaller kernel than 2.6, and for supporting legacy systems that only
> boot from floppies, I regularly use it on a single boot floppy, using uclibc and
> busybox, along with e2fs tools and also dialog, for lots of support software we
> develop.  I guess we have a thing about getting it all on one floppy, but it
> would be helpful if we could jump into a 2.6 kernel on CD, for some situations.
> Legacy systems won't boot from CD in most cases.

I did some measurements in early 2.6.  Using the patches from the linux tiny
tree.  2.6 was comparable with 2.2 and noticeably smaller than  2.4.

Basically my conclusion is that 2.6 was only bigger because it had more
stuff in it by default and almost all of that stuff is configurable.

Eric