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CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL option added

DISCUSSION Jody Bruchon 2 participants 2 messages Mar 23, 2015

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I've added a new kernel configuration option that reduces the size of the kernel without harmfully changing kernel functionality. CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL will turn off some unnecessary informational driver initialization messages and the code that is used to generate them. This will be expanded as I find more opportunities in the code to apply it. For now, if you use the current git snapshot with and without this option selected, the results will be something like this:

text    data    bss     dec
55840   6984    50884   113708  CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL=n
55152   6720    50884   112756  CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL=y
 -688   -264        0     -952  Change

I also updated the kernel defconfig to match currently available options and cleaned out some junk kernel config options that were not referenced anywhere in the actual code.

-Jody

#1 lore raw

Hello Jody,

Reducing the kernel size by making it less verbous looks fine, but I think the option is misnamed and that could lead to confusion. A newbie like me would understand that option as "reduce the kernel features to gain space", not the amount of traces. So I would rename it something like "VERBOSE_LESS" ?

Also, could it be possible to make such changes like this latest one in another development branch, so that we could have a stable master branch, as the official Linux, so that we could review, test, validate and mature the changes on our different platforms before merging them ?

Regards,

Marc-F. Lucca-Daniau

Le 23/03/2015 03:21, Jody Bruchon a écrit :

Quoted 8 lines

I've added a new kernel configuration option that reduces the size of the kernel without harmfully changing kernel functionality. CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL will turn off some unnecessary informational driver initialization messages and the code that is used to generate them. This will be expanded as I find more opportunities in the code to apply it. For now, if you use the current git snapshot with and without this option selected, the results will be something like this:

text    data    bss     dec
55840   6984    50884   113708  CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL=n
55152   6720    50884   112756  CONFIG_SMALL_KERNEL=y
 -688   -264        0     -952  Change

I also updated the kernel defconfig to match currently available options and cleaned out some junk kernel config options that were not referenced anywhere in the actual code.

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