I. Szczesniak wrote: > 2009/12/3 Dave Miner <dminer at opensolaris.org>: >> Mike Gerdts wrote: >> ... >>> - How compressible is bytecode compared to uncompiled code? That is, >>> once it is put into a compressed disk image format, how much space is >>> really being saved? >>> >> All of Mike's points are well-taken, especially this one. An argument that >> "it might help the Live CD" without data to back it up is not going >> anywhere. Essentially all of the contents of the live CD are compressed in >> one way or another already, be it by lofi (using lzma) for the major parts >> that stay on the media, or gzip (or dcfs) for the root archive, so proposing >> to compress them by other means is relatively unlikely to lead to actual >> observed benefit. >> >> I'll further add that, in at least some instances, we've actually seen >> adverse impacts based on some of the recent projects. For example, the >> recent conversion of cut(1) and other objects to ksh93 built-ins actually >> increased the size of the ramdisk required on SPARC by a couple of >> megabytes. > > Could you please elaborate where these megabytes should come from? > ksh93 is /bin/sh in Opensolaris and to run ksh93 you must have the > ksh93 libraries installed. The new version of cut(1) is a small > executable which reuses these libraries which are already part of the > system core, i.e. the actual change was to reduce the existing cut(1) > to a 20k executable and flip a switch in the package system. > I believe that this is unlikely to add 'a couple of megabytes'. >
The boot archives are minimized specially to keep memory requirements low and thus the SPARC AI boot archive didn't have some libraries that weren't previously required until later in the boot process. See http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=12833 The actual size change of the SPARC boot archive between 127 and 128a is 5 MB; since I haven't looked at what else changed I won't to attribute it all to ksh93, but the files listed in the fix were roughly 2 MB in size, as I recall. Dave
