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Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 13:51:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>
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To: John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>
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Subject: Re: Unbloating the kernel, was: :mem=16MB laptop testing
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On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, John Bradford wrote:

> > On one hand I agree with you - OTOH: why not run an older version of the
> > kernel?
>
> Security issues.  That applies for userspace as well.  Not upgrading,
> or at least disabling the functionality with the security issue is
> irresponsible.
[SNIPPED...]


>
> > As for making the kernel smaller - perhaps a solution would be to code all
> > strings as error codes and return ERROR#42345 or something instead of the
> > full messages - there seem to be quite a lot of them.  I don't mean to
> > suggest this solution for all compilations but perhaps a switch to remove
> > strings and replace them with ints and then a seperately generated file of
> > errnum->string. I'd expect that between 10-15% of the uncompressed kernel
> > is currently pure text.
>
> I agree, error codes would be nice, but this discussion has come up
> before and I doubt they will ever get in to mainline.
>

Really good guess!

-rw-r--r--   1 root     root       151483 Oct 14 13:49 Strings.txt
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root      1567340 Oct 14 09:39 vmlinux

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.22 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.