Re: Kernel too big?

Werner Almesberger (almesber@lrc.di.epfl.ch)
Tue, 23 Sep 1997 16:19:24 +0200 (MET DST)

Thomas Wouters wrote:
> Simply splitting the kernel up into different, but complete trees for each
> architecture sounds like a much better idea.

Hmm, I doubt it. For linux-2.1.55-VGER-CVS970915.tar.gz::

Compressed Uncompressed
"generic" 8.9 MB 37.8 MB
i386 only 7.0 MB 29.1 MB (*)
reduction 21.6% 23.1%

(*) Removed things from arch/* and include/asm-*; didn't go after
individual drivers. With PCI becoming the common denominator on all
platforms, we'll probably see comparably few platform-specific
drivers in the future anyway.

Given the current growth trend, 22% correspond roughly to eight or nine
months. Also, given that we're covering most "interesting" architectures
now, the platform-specific part should grow only slowly, so the overall
gain decreases.

- Werner

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