Re: Easy trick to reduce kernel footprint

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

Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 07:07:43AM -0400, Wakko Warner wrote:
>  
> > 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.
> 
> With what algo and what kernel size ?
> With the close-source upx-1.93 linked with the NRV compression, I often
> observe an average 15-20% gain on the bzImage size if it does not embed
> an initramfs. I remember that the UCL library was not as good as the NRV,
> so I've stopped using it a long time ago.

I'm using upx-ucl-beta v1.91+0.20030910cvs-2 debian package.
Command line:
upx-ucl-beta -9 -f bupxImage-2.6.12-rc6
-rw-r--r--  3 root root 618442 Jun  6 16:14 bupxImage-2.6.12-rc6
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root 669106 Jun  6 16:14 bzImage-2.6.12-rc6*
50664 bytes savings.
the kernel I have there is 100% modular except that ramdisk is compiled in. 
It was also compiled with -Os (Optimize for size config option) using gcc
3.3.5.

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