Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 17:53:07 -0800 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Benjamin Lutz <benlutz@datacomm.ch>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why is the FreeBSD kernel so much bigger than the Linux kernel? Message-ID: <3A6E3583.B5F42F16@acuson.com> References: <NDBBKGBBKDPDNFIFCJEJEEDOCHAA.benlutz@datacomm.ch> <20010124115812.G37060@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: > I have a Linux box here: > > [grog@capellorosso /boot]$ ls -l /boot/vmlinux-2.2.16-22 > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1621492 Aug 23 06:26 /boot/vmlinux-2.2.16-22 > > That's not very different. Note that a lot of hardware support in > Linux is done in loadable modules, while FreeBSD has it in the kernel. Your Linux is a default kernel off of some distribution (the -22 gives it away). A 2.2.16 kernel I just compiled to support only the hardware actually present on the system weighs in at only 416,492 bytes. That's a quarter the size you gave. (a FreeBSD kernel compiled for the same system was over one megabyte). Granted, FreeBSD has a different architecture than Linux. Comparing the sizes of the kernels is like comparing apples and oranges. But Ben's question was a good one, so I'll expand on it. Does putting the hardware support into the kernel instead of modules account for this big of a difference? David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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