Re: Easy trick to reduce kernel footprint

[Wakko Warner <wakko@animx.eu.org>]

Keep me CC.

Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 09:02:46PM -0400, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > Is it any smaller than a UPX'd kernel?  (I think you need the beta version. 
> > I know the upx-ucl in debian won't compress but upx-ucl-beta will if you
> > force).  I got a significant reduction using it.
> 
> It's not better at all, but unfortunately, UPX cannot compress a kernel which
> embeds a big initramfs. The problem is that the compressed initramfs is
> embedded into vmlinux, which is then compressed into bzImage, and UPX only
> replaces the bzImage compression.
> 
> May be it would work if we did not compress the initramfs before including
> it into the vmlinux.

My initramfs is passed via initrd so that I can change any aspect of it with
out recompiling the kernel (or maybe i could use a better understanding of
initramfs)  I compared bzImage to bupxImage and the savings I got was around
50kb difference IIRC.

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