Messages in this thread |  | | | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | | Subject | Re: klibc - another libc? | | Date | Wed, 7 Jun 2006 14:17:08 -0700 (PDT) |
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Followup to: <44869397.4000907@tls.msk.ru> By author: Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > After several mentions of klibc recently, I want to ask a question. > > I understand all the kernel-mode cleanups -- moving initialization > from kernel to user space is a very good thing. > > But the question really is: why yet another libc? We already have > dietlibc, uclibc, glibc, now klibc... With modern kernel, initramfs > will very probably contain quite some programs linked with glibc > (modprobe/insmod, mdadm/lvm, etc; I highly suggest putting some > minimal text editor like nvi there too, for rescue purposes) -- > so why not have an option to use whatever libc is available on > the host platform? >
You have that option just fine; if you build your own initramfs you can do whatever you want.
> In the other words, kinit/ipconfig/nfsmount/etc stuff is ok, > no questions. But the libc itself -- what for?
To be able to *require* it, which means it can't significantly bloat the total size of the kernel image. klibc binaries are *extremely* small. Static kinit is only a few tens of kilobytes, a lot of which is zlib.
> And another related question: why not dietlibc which is already > here, for quite long time?
- Bigger by an order of magnitude - License issues - Platform support - Speed of portability (klibc is fully portable to a new platform in an afternoon) - Additional issues which you can find if look through the archives of this list
-hpa
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