Re: New (now current development process)

Rob Landley
2005-11-01T09:10:36Z

On Monday 31 October 2005 18:13, Linus Torvalds 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.
>
> But some of it is likely also compilers. gcc does insane padding in many
> cases these days.
>
> And a lot of it is us just being bloated. Argh.
>
> Linus

Matt Mackall! Tiny tree! Yay rah cool!

http://selenic.com/tiny/2.6.14-tiny1-broken-out.tar.bz2

Rob

P.S. There's a reason I'm trying to make a real working development system
based on busybox and uclibc. I think things like live CDs should be using
that, not the GNU packages.

There seems to be a periodic trend, where ever few years open source programs
get feature-laden enough that somebody forks off (or starts over) a version
that has the sole virtue of being smaller and simpler. From glibc->uClibc,
gnome/kde->xfce, OpenSSH->dropbear, gnu->busybox... Of course mozilla had to
do this twice (Galleon, then Firefox) to get something remotely reasonable,
but oh well.

(And it'd be really NICE if tcc became a reasonable replacement for gcc.
Guess what the bloated memory-thrashing load that selectively triggers the
OOM killer (when swappiness=0 but not when swappiness=60) I reported earlier
is? Building gcc 4.0.2, genattrtab and compiling the resulting
insn-attrab.c. It won't run in "only" 128 megs of ram at the best of
times...)

Rob