From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932422AbWFGVRq (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Jun 2006 17:17:46 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932423AbWFGVRq (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Jun 2006 17:17:46 -0400 Received: from hera.kernel.org ([140.211.167.34]:12993 "EHLO hera.kernel.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932422AbWFGVRp (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Jun 2006 17:17:45 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: klibc - another libc? Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 14:17:08 -0700 (PDT) Organization: Mostly alphabetical, except Q, with we do not fancy Message-ID: References: <44869397.4000907@tls.msk.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT X-Trace: terminus.zytor.com 1149715028 17478 127.0.0.1 (7 Jun 2006 21:17:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@terminus.zytor.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 21:17:08 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Followup to: <44869397.4000907@tls.msk.ru> By author: Michael Tokarev In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > After several mentions of klibc recently, I want to ask a question. > > I understand all the kernel-mode cleanups -- moving initialization > from kernel to user space is a very good thing. > > But the question really is: why yet another libc? We already have > dietlibc, uclibc, glibc, now klibc... With modern kernel, initramfs > will very probably contain quite some programs linked with glibc > (modprobe/insmod, mdadm/lvm, etc; I highly suggest putting some > minimal text editor like nvi there too, for rescue purposes) -- > so why not have an option to use whatever libc is available on > the host platform? > You have that option just fine; if you build your own initramfs you can do whatever you want. > In the other words, kinit/ipconfig/nfsmount/etc stuff is ok, > no questions. But the libc itself -- what for? To be able to *require* it, which means it can't significantly bloat the total size of the kernel image. klibc binaries are *extremely* small. Static kinit is only a few tens of kilobytes, a lot of which is zlib. > And another related question: why not dietlibc which is already > here, for quite long time? - Bigger by an order of magnitude - License issues - Platform support - Speed of portability (klibc is fully portable to a new platform in an afternoon) - Additional issues which you can find if look through the archives of this list -hpa