Re: New (now current development process)

Andrew Morton
2005-11-01T00:34:08Z

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > Are you sure these kernels are feature-equivalent?
>
> They may not be feature-equivalent in reality, but it's hard to generate
> something that has the features (or lack there-of) of old kernels these
> days. Which is problematic.

Probably.

> But some of it is likely also compilers. gcc does insane padding in many
> cases these days.

2.6.14 `make allnoconfig':

gcc-2.95.4:

bix:/usr/src/25> size vmlinux
text data bss dec hex filename
665502 152379 55120 873001 d5229 vmlinux

gcc version 4.1.0 20050513 (experimental):

bix:/usr/src/25> size vmlinux
text data bss dec hex filename
761415 151851 55280 968546 ec762 vmlinux

(There's a new reason for retaining gcc-2.95.x support)

(gcc-4.x can probably be tuned up with appropriate `-malign' options)

> And a lot of it is us just being bloated. Argh.

2.5.71, gcc-2.95.4:

bix:/usr/src/aa/linux-2.5.71> size vmlinux
text data bss dec hex filename
501892 54163 40420 596475 919fb vmlinux

yes, it got bigger. .data went through the roof - maybe inlined debug stuff?

2.6.8.1, gcc-2.95.4:

bix:/usr/src/aa/linux-2.6.8.1> size vmlinux
text data bss dec hex filename
605032 153817 58176 817025 c7781 vmlinux

It happened somewhere between 2.5.71 and 2.6.8.

2.4.x doesn't have allnoconfig, so no numbers for that.