Re: kernel size

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 11:43:14AM -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:
> "Richard B. Johnson" <[e-mail]> said:
> > On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Ingo Oeser wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > strip -R .ident -R .comment -R .note
> > > 
> > > is your friend. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Yes! Wonderful...
> > -rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root      1571516 Oct  9 10:50 vmlinux
> > -rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root      1590692 Oct  1 13:26 vmlinux.OLD
> > 
> > That got rid of some cruft.
> 
> Yep. A WHOOPing 1.2% of the total. BTW, is this stuff ever being loaded
> into RAM with the executable kernel, discarded on boot, or what?

It is not SHF_ALLOC, so it will not make it into vmlinuz either.

> IMHO, it would be more productive to go after savings via .init*, and
> perhaps bug the GCC/binutils people to merge strings...

?
gcc-2.96-RH (2.96-91 and above) and recent gcc 3.1 CVS together with
recent binutils support merging strings already. Unlike killing
.comment/.note sections, this saves real kernel memory.

This reminds me, I should finally hack up binutils so that it uses SHF_MERGE
for .ident directives automatically.

	Jakub