From owner-freebsd-newbies Tue Jan 23 17:56:25 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from odin.acuson.com (odin.acuson.com [157.226.230.71]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BC58137B400 for ; Tue, 23 Jan 2001 17:56:08 -0800 (PST) Received: from acuson.com ([157.226.47.12]) by odin.acuson.com (Netscape Messaging Server 3.54) with ESMTP id AAA38D7; Tue, 23 Jan 2001 18:00:28 -0800 Message-ID: <3A6E3583.B5F42F16@acuson.com> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 17:53:07 -0800 From: David Johnson Organization: Acuson X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg Lehey Cc: Benjamin Lutz , freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why is the FreeBSD kernel so much bigger than the Linux kernel? References: <20010124115812.G37060@wantadilla.lemis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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