Re: Cleaning up elkscmd and adding help text - Questions

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> Yes, it is still too large for a 1 MB address space, but don't you think 
> it would be worth giving a try to reduce the uclibc and Busybox 
> footprint, rather than doing the same job as the our friends ?

Massively dieting a large C library (or indeed most large apps) is
actually usually harder than just doing the job properly in the first
place. There are trade-offs you make that differ when you've got 64K of
space to play with and there are whole areas of implementation that you
do differently.

The same with kernels. One of the big problems ELKS has even after all
this time is stuff like some of the waitqueue and disk logic inherited
from Linux 1.x era. It's way way less compact than the implementation
that would have been done from scratch because the Linux model was
designed to scale to hundreds of processes and assumes that kernel data
space is cheap. Neither is true. As a result of that design ELKS can't
swap out the kernel stacks of idle processes either to other memory or to
disk, which leaves it permanently starved of buffer space.

Alan