Re: The end of embedded Linux?

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@conectiva.com.br>]

Em Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 05:23:06PM -0500, Oliver Xymoron escreveu:
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 12:36:50PM -0700, Gigi Duru wrote:

> > I know you guys are struggling to bring "world class VM & IO" to Linux,
> > going for SMPs and other big toys, but you are about to lose what you
> > already have: the embedded market.
 
> It's still plenty small enough for many many embedded uses and most people
> are more than happy with it. The reason that it's not even smaller is no one
> has stepped forward to do the trimming. It's easy enough to do, but we can
> only assume from the fact that no one's done so is that it's really not that
> important.
 
> If you think it's important, either make it happen or pay someone else to
> make it happen. 

I've been thinking about working on a CONFIG_TINY for ages and would love to
have somebody else beat me to do this, as currently I'm too busy saving old
network protocols and with a backlog of patches for general network
infrastructure (clean up include/linux/skbuff.h so that it doesn't have any
reference to specific protocols, in the same way that I did for
include/net/sock.h) and macroising access to stats in tcp/ip so that we can
be preempt friendly.

I have also __initstr patches to free more memory after boot by moving the
strings in __init functions to .data.init section that will help with
embedded stuff as well. Some of the strings are passed to things like
register_chrdev and would require changes in those register functions to
copy the string passed as it will be freed after boot, etc.

- Arnaldo