On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Jeremy Jackson wrote: > ...but working on the 2.5.6 ide subsystem, > I notice that just ide.o is ~48k... almost as big as linuxBIOS itsself. > drivers/ide/*.o is like 512k. I'll try using the "old" hd.c driver... > perhaps it's smaller
yes but ide.o in linux is really complicated for all the amazingly broken hardware that is out there. Eric does have a good point that polling-only drivers can be tiny. And I still prefer Linux as my bootloader, no matter what anyone says, since nobody can show me how to make etherboot work over myrinet or pci backplane or SCI or ... > In trying to strip down the Linux kernel, has it been tried to configure it > without even some of the stuff we take for granted? Give it a shot, but feature creep has REALLY grown the kernel. Just try to turn off the dentry cache, for example. You just can't do it. > I'm guessing nobody has gone far enough to say for sure it's impossible, > right? No, there's always hope. But, for example, some things that do "exec" require procfs. Which you don't find out until you try to build it. Hmm. Plan9 was much easier to strip down ... ron
