[buug] linux is out of control

[f.johan.beisser]

On 5 Aug 2002, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

> With the release of linux 2.4.19 last weekend, the unpacked source
> tree is about 160M large.

i'd simply grab the patches, and occasionally clean out the source tree.
this should help keep the bulk and bloat down.

> Does anyone else see this as a problem (before you reply "disk space
> is cheap" please think about my sig just this once), and if so, what
> solutions or measures can you suggest to deal with it?

only grab the sources you need, for the hardware you need. that's probably
all you can do, really. the other bit you covered down below..

> As an example of the kind of answer I'm hoping for, long ago I
> actually used to trim the tree by deleting the parts I had no use
> for.  I don't remember what changes I had to make in the build process
> to have "make config" etc. behave correctly, though.

i really don't know, off hand. the obvious changes would be specific
hardware support removal.

as a comparison, kind of..

OpenBSD-current's normal kernel source
du -h /usr/src/sys
93M     /usr/src/sys

FreeBSD-4.5's normal kernel source..
du -h /usr/src/sys
78M    /usr/src/sys

please note that OpenBSD supports 15 (alpha, i386, sparc, sparc64,
powerpc, etc) different architectures, and FreeBSD 4.5 only supports 3
(alpha, i386, pc98). your normal linux kernel has some really obscure
hardware, and fairly unusual architecture support. i suspect that NetBSD
is larger than either, since it's supporting roughly 28 very different
architectures.

no matter what OS you're running, if you handle the source code, it's
going to be a little bloaty. especially if there are many unusual drivers
and support for many rare pieces of hardware that you don't have.

this holds very true for Linux, since it's generally maintaining support
for most common (and uncommon) pieces of hardware. if you can find a way
of simply grabbing the drivers you need that will probably cure your bloat
problem.

of course, i'm not exceedingly familiar with Linux..

-------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+
  http://caustic.org/~jan                      jan at caustic.org
    "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse
         of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche