From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sat, 2 Nov 2002 03:44:41 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sat, 2 Nov 2002 03:44:40 -0500 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:34313 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sat, 2 Nov 2002 03:44:40 -0500 Message-ID: <3DC391D3.7040005@zytor.com> Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 00:50:27 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020828 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, sv MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jeff Garzik CC: Aaron Lehmann , Linus Torvalds , LKML , viro@math.psu.edu Subject: Re: [BK PATCHES] initramfs merge, part 1 of N References: <3DC38939.90001@pobox.com> <20021102084226.GA7800@vitelus.com> <3DC390F2.6040600@pobox.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jeff Garzik wrote: > Aaron Lehmann wrote: > >> On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 03:13:45AM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: >> >> >>> The Future. >>> >>> Early userspace is going to be merged in a series of evolutionary >>> changes, following what I call "The Al Viro model." NO KERNEL >>> BEHAVIOR SHOULD CHANGE. [that's for the lkml listeners, not you >>> ] "make" will continue to simply Do The Right Thing(tm) on all >>> platforms, while the kernel image continues to get progressively >>> smaller. >>> >> >> >> Won't the initial userspace be linked into the kernel? If so, why will >> the kernel image get smaller? >> >> > > Yes and no ;-) > > Ignoring for a moment initramfses loaded from your bootloader (a la > initrd)... The amount of code that runs in kernel space shrinks, which > is the main point of early userspace. If you are talking in terms of > overall kernel image size, yes, but the initramfs cpio archive is > ditching along with the rest of __init code, so you're really only > talking about wasting a couple of additional pages in vmlinux -- a > slight increase in disk space usage, and that's it. > > So runtime memory usage certainly does not increase... > By the way, the final initramfs should typically be a union of whatever sources there are; with the ones linked into the kernel image unpacked first (so they can be overwritten if so specified to the bootloader.) -hpa