Re: binary size changes from 0.1.0

[David Given <dg@cowlark.com>]

On Thursday 10 June 2004 08:35, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> Also if you check some simple utils, like chmod and others, you will see
> that significant amount of size is error description, I mean textual
> representation of errno codes, as you can get by calling perror() or
> via sys_errlist array. The only problem that almost EACH utility has
> to contain these messages. So, the best soultion would be shared library
> of course but it's hard to implement at once. In my experimental OS
> this was handled in quite "ugly" way: include messages into the kernel,
> and let a syscall query the error message. This is very ugly, but it's
> simple, and avoids each binary contain all of the messages, so it will
> result in less memory usage, and of course smaller disk image ...

One common trick is to not keep the list of error messages in memory at all, 
but to keep them in a file on disk. When perror() is called, the file is 
opened, read until the right error message is found, and that one used... of 
course, this approach means that you can't do sys_errlist, but it's perfectly 
adequate for perror.

You may also want to check to see if the optimisation settings have changed.

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Est brilgum: toui slimici
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