From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S964873AbWFHPcv (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Jun 2006 11:32:51 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S964876AbWFHPcv (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Jun 2006 11:32:51 -0400 Received: from hera.kernel.org ([140.211.167.34]:6112 "EHLO hera.kernel.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S964873AbWFHPcu (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Jun 2006 11:32:50 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: klibc - another libc? Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 08:32:19 -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 1149780739 5522 127.0.0.1 (8 Jun 2006 15:32:19 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@terminus.zytor.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 15:32:19 +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: By author: Roman Zippel In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > Hi, > > On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > 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. > > Every project starts small and has the annoying tendency to grow. > That still doesn't answer, why it has to be distributed with the kernel, > just install the thing somewhere under /lib and Kbuild can link to it. The > point is that it contains nothing kernel specific and doesn't has to be > rebult with every new kernel. > Actually, that isn't quite true. One of the ways klibc is kept small is by not guaranteeing a stable ABI... and not having compatibility support for older kernels. This is one of the kinds of luxuries that bundling offers. Does it make bundling mandatory? Not really. In fact, people have been using klibc in its standalone form for years. However, I believe there would be a lot of resistace to have the kernel tarball have outside dependencies on anything but the most basic build tools. -hpa