Re: [PATCH] Only use MSDOS-Partitions by default on X86

Jens Axboe
2003-05-06T19:08:32Z

On Tue, May 06 2003, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Tue, 6 May 2003, Jens Axboe wrote:
>
> > On Tue, May 06 2003, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > On Tue, 6 May 2003, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Tue, May 06 2003, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > > > On Maw, 2003-05-06 at 18:23, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > > > > According to Alan it's nearly possible to configure the block layer out
> > > > > > entirely, which would be a good thing to associate with a CONFIG_DISK option
> > > > > > too.
> > > > >
> > > > > David Woodhouse I believe..
> > > >
> > > > Are we talking about everything below submit_bh/bio? Shouldn't be too
> > > > hard to write a small no-block.c for that...
> > >
> > > The idea is to configure out everything not needed when only NFS and/or JFFS
> > > (which doesn't rely on the block layer to work) are used. Pretty useful for
> > > networked or embedded machines.
> >
> > I see, that would indeed be a bigger job :). Just the block layer would
> > not be hard, especially if you make the restriction that the block
> > drivers usable would be ones that used a make_request strategy for
> > handling requests. That would allow you to kill ll_rw_blk.c,
> > deadline-iosched.c, and elevator.c. That's some 21k of text and 2k of
> > data on this box.
>
> That's certainly a good start.

How easy it is depends on which drivers need to work - which? mtdblock
comes to mind, a quick glance reveals that should be a breeze to make
work. It would even simplify it a bit, as the 'push request handling to
thread context' could be killed as well.

--
Jens Axboe