GSOC 2013 project " Kernel Size Reduction for Embedded System "

[Adrian Chadd]

On 8 April 2013 19:28, Kevin Day <toasty at dragondata.com> wrote:

> Ages ago we had to make things work in 16 or 32MB of total system memory on i386.
>
> For the most part, disabling every compiled-in option/driver we didn't need was 90% of the effort. Which options/drivers is going to be totally application dependent, so that really can't be done for you.
>
> As for the rest, there isn't any large low hanging fruit that can get culled from the kernel easily. The base kernel isn't modular enough to trim out individual syscalls or anything, and doing so wouldn't have made a huge dent.
>
> There are a lot of ways FreeBSD could be more embedded friendly (being able turn on/off parts of userland depending on licenses is a huge one), but producing a trimmed kernel isn't something I'd rank very highly. If building a kernel with everything modularized as possible isn't small enough, FreeBSD probably isn't going to work for you for other reasons.

The MIPS kernels I'm producing are pretty bare. There's not a lot of
options to disable at this point.. :(



Adrian