Re: Patches for REALLY TINY 386 kernels

From: Andi Kleen
Date: Wed Jul 18 2007 - 14:38:52 EST


On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 08:29:27PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>
> On Jul 18 2007 20:20, Andi Kleen wrote:
> >>
> >> Well, how big the vmlinux file is matters if it doesn't fit in memory
> >> with enough time to get to the phase where it is dumping the init
> >> sections.
> >
> >If you don't have enough memory for a few tens of KB of init sections
> >you're very unlikely to have enough memory for user space.
>
> If the code was not too hackish, I would not buy that.
> Routers for example can run -- minus the userspace utilities required to set
> things up -- "without" userspace.

They still need memory for packets and other data structures.
Without having enough memory to queue packets and keep the routing cache you cannot do
any useful routing.

-Andi
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