Re: [Announce] Linux-tiny project revival

Indan Zupancic
2007-09-20T23:06:56Z

On Fri, September 21, 2007 01:18, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Thursday 20 September 2007 4:26:13 pm Indan Zupancic wrote:
>> A quick scroll through a vmlinux binary shows that there are quite a
>> lot areas consisting only of some repeated pattern. Mostly 0x00, but
>> also 0x90 and ".GCC: (GNU) 4.2.1.". Getting rid of those would save
>> something between 50 and 100KB.
>
> Worse, if you feed an absolute path to O= when you build the kernel out of
> tree, then it uses absolute paths for all the __FILE__ strings and that makes
> kernel BIIIIIG. (Did that by accident a while back.) Too bad there's no way
> to keep the __FILE__ strings compressed at runtime and gunzip them as needed
> like busybox does with help messages... :)

I suspect that can be fixed by changing the built system. How can using O=
change the source file path anyway? That seems unnecessary.

It seems to be worse, full pathnames are also used when giving a relative path.
(I'm using O=../obj/).

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to cause that much bloat here:

$ strings vmlinux | grep /home/ |wc
119 181 6400

CC'ing Sam Ravnborg, perhaps he has some ideas.

Greetings,

Indan