Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 21 Mar 1996 18:17:03 -0500 (EST) | From | Brian M Grunkemeyer <> | Subject | Re: Jettisoning init code (was: nfsroot anyone?) |
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Excerpts from internet.computing.linux-kernel: 21-Mar-96 Re: Jettisoning init code (.. by H. Peter Anvin@freya.ygg > It seems to me that the way to do it would be to have another segment > for this. I *think* ELF can support more segments than .code and > .data. Is there any way to get gas/gcc to use them, and if not, how > hard would it be to hack them to support .initcode and .initdata > segments?
Beyond just the kernel, could this work for all applications? If we could add sections for initial code and data as well as terminating code (if there is anything that can be classified this way...), then we could reduce the memory usage significantly on a system. First, you'd never need to keep the init code in memory. The terminating sections (.endcode and .enddata?) could be left on disk, or just read into memory and be among the first things swapped out to disk if memory gets tight.
It would save a decent amount of memory. How much work would it take to add support into all the development utilities and possibly the swap code to handle this?
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