Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 22 Jan 1997 10:26:17 -0500 (EST) | From | Michal Ostrowski <> | Subject | Re: Packaged Kernel |
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To throw some numbers into the discussion, in an un-tarred source tree, here's how the architecture specific code breaks down (in terms of size):
i386: 958kB alpha: 634kB sparc: 1240kB mips: 487kB ppc: 507kB m68k: 2504kB sparc64: 463kB
arch specific code: 6793kB totatl source tree: 27726kB (I just got these by doing 'du' in the arch and include directories - kernel 2.1.21 - no .o files or anything , just the raw untarred source).
As you can see, the average person will use about 6MB storing code that they will never use.
Also the drivers sub-tree uses 13799kB, and as with the architecture specific stuff there's a lot of code in there that may never be used.
Everyone has benefited from increased hardware support, but if every driver for every single device is included into the kernel we're going to see incredibly large source trees. As an example consider this: About one year ago, the current development kernel was 1.3.55 - the size of the tgz'ed source was 3.7MB 2.1.21 comes in at just under 7MB.
Now I'm not advocating that we split everything up into tiny pieces, that may simply not be feasible especially with regards to applying patches (I certainly wouldn't want to go around trying to find individual patches for each of my device drivers), but something needs to be done.
Perhaps what is needed is tighter controls on which drivers are included in the kernel (ie: based on how many people use them), and consideration for how one can include drivers not in the main source tree easily (with minimal patches to kernel source files).
And now back to lurking...
Michal Ostrowski mostrows@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
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