Subject: RE: MIPS Kernel size

From: "Smith, Todd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 11:12:10 -0500

Hello Ralf,

I am still interested in some older PDA usage that has limited resources.  I
certainly don't want to hold up or stop current kernel dev but is there a
problem with keeping small kernel and/or userspace limits?

Thank you for the discussion.

Todd Smith <[email-masked]>  

-----Original Message-----
From: Ralf Baechle
Btw, the -tiny tree of 2.6 has been booted on a 2MB system.  Supposedly
that
was an i386 system so MIPS16 should boot in an even smaller system and a
normal 32-bit MIPS kernel should have enough space to wiggle in 4 megs.

Does anybody on this list actually still care about that small systems?

  Ralf

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 19:53:29 +0100

> problem with keeping small kernel and/or userspace limits?

Different tradeoffs.  In general the kernel is optimized for performance,
even at the cost of significant amounts of memory.  As the most infamous
example the kernel is using lots of fairly complex hash and radix trees.

But why would a system that has just a default route need the same kind
of data structures and algorithms it takes to route packets on backbone
router in the default free zone?  Why would you drive a moon rocket to
for shopping?

Linux has generally developped in the direction of larger machines and
higher scalability and sometimes that's causing fairly bad itching.  The
-tiny tree is an attempt to correct this.  It's a development tree but
with the goal of merging changes back into the standard kernel and I
hope much of it will be merged back into 2.6 - 2.8 is too far in the
future to wait for ...

  Ralf