Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 08/24] net, diet: Make TCP metrics optional | From | Tom Zanussi <> | Date | Mon, 05 May 2014 23:39:08 -0500 |
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On Mon, 2014-05-05 at 23:23 -0400, David Miller wrote: > From: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> > Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 05:21:14 +0200 > > > What parts would you remove to get the foot print down for a 2MB > > single purpose machine? > > I wouldn't use Linux, end of story. > > Maybe two decades ago, but not now, those days are over.
These 'new' systems we're talking about pretty much are the same as systems from 20 years ago e.g. Quark, which is essentially a 486, with tiny amounts of RAM, say less than 2 MB, so I hope those days aren't over forever for Linux...
Anyway, Andi's net-diet and LTO patches allowed me to go from a kernel text size of above 1100k down to about 750k with the kernel network stack running an unmodified small web server (nostromo) and the ability to drop in a dedicated single-purpose application that this type of system would typically run e.g. something based on for example UDP.
I was able to get that down to about 620k removing INET completely and replacing it with LWIP, but LWIP either bloated the application back up to similar memory usage numbers as with INET configured in, or alternatively required extensive changes to the application in order to use the not-bloating low-level interface.
But why go to all that trouble when there's a perfectly good networking stack in the kernel? Even if most of these options aren't things that would be useful to most systems, being able to turn them off and save 1/3 of the kernel text size for tiny systems like this does makes a big difference...
Tom
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