On Wednesday 02 November 2005 00:05, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > Anyway, it would be great to find ways to make big improvements.  But
> > I think the most realistic way to shrink the kernel is the same way it
> > grows in the first place -- one small piece at a time.
>
> No, I think that's a lost cause.
>
> It doesn't grow by 700 bytes once in a while. It grows by much more, and
> much more often. And we can't fight it that way, that's just not going to
> work. Maybe have something that tracks individual object file sizes and
> shames people into not growing them..

nm --size-sort vmlinux

Old busybox size optimization trick.  Running it on 2.6.14 "allnoconfig" 
attached.  Lots and lots of small symbols (sizes are in hex), with no really 
big low-hanging fruit jumping out.

Rob