Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 22:42:52 -0700 From: Julian Elischer <julian@ref.tfs.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: kernel size Message-ID: <199508310542.WAA01965@ref.tfs.com>
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I've been playing around trying to make a bootable fixit disk today.. the over-all lesson is: we need to shrink our bloated stuff :) the -current tree can't build a 'boot' floppy at this time.. (as needed for the 'install') the kernel is too big with it's MFS built in, and you end up with a 'length error'.. text data bss dec hex 999424 1159168 75572 2234164 221734 MFSKERNEL erf# bc bc 1.02 (Mar 3, 92) Copyright (C) 1991, 1992 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 999424+1159168 2158592 2*1024*1024 2097152 so we see we can't fit into the 2MB we need, to boot on a 4MB machine.. (dang!) I guess we can still compress the binaries in the mfs filesystem which would leave them still compressed when the kernel is decompressed, but that would possibly mean we would use more memory as processes couldn't share pages.. does anyone have any ideas about what we can do to shrink our product? the smallest kernel I could make that was of any use was about 500K... the GENERIC 386BSD 0.0 kernel was about that big :) I think that inevitably we are going to have to go back to a 2 floppy boot.. the more device drivers we have the harder it's going to be to fit them in.. I think we will have a "I'll boot to MFS" floppy, and then we may need another floppy with all the loadable modules.. "place the 'drivers' floppy in A:" while we load each driver in turn and ask it to see if it's thing is there.. I'm just thinking about which way we are going to have to go..
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