Re: [PATCH 2.5] Retrieve configuration information from kernel

[Chris Friesen]

Khalid Aziz wrote:
> Paul Clements wrote:
> 
>>Have you considered compressing the config info in order to reduce
>>the space wastage in the loaded kernel image? Could easily be 10's of KB
>>(not that that's a lot these days). The info would then be retrieved via
>>"gunzip -c", et al. instead of a simple "cat".
>>
> 
> I wanted to start with a simple implementation first. There are a couple
> of things that can be done in future to further improve meory usage: (1)
> Drop "CONFIG_" and "# CONFIG_" from each line and add it back when
> printing from /proc/ikconfig and extract-ikconfig script, (2) Compress
> the resulting configuration. Something to do in near future :)

Do we really need to store the ones that are not actually set to 
something?  You'll get a bunch of queries when doing a "make oldconfig", 
but saying N to all of them should just work...after all its the ones 
that are actually *set* that we care about.

Also, if you wanted to get cute, you could make use of the fact that the 
config names only use ascii chars from '0' to 'Z' which can be 
represented by 6 bits, then pack them together in memory.  I don't know 
how much difference this would make after zipping though.

Chris

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