Limitations of Crunchgen

[Jason C. Wells]

On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:

> FWIW, I build images (off 4.8-RELEASE), with everything dynamic, using
> -Os.  I get big chunks of the base system, plus some ports, under 16 megs
> pretty easily.  Routing, DNS, web serving, DHCP, PPP(oE), yada yada yada.
> With that base, you can shoehorn one heck of a lot in 64 megs.

I am not a hacker.  The -Os flag is news to me.  From your report, it
looks like just the ticket.  My goal is to have a very small system, but
still have it be FreeBSD, with as little invasion (read work) on my part.

Crunchgen was shaping up to be pretty handy for "/" only.  My crunched
binary was smaller than my kernel!

> > I read up on minibsd.  I don't like the notion of dynamic linked /bin and
> > /sbin.
>
> Which would be the sticking point.  Why not?  Heck, if you're
> crunchgen'ing everything, then you've got a single point of failure for
> everything anyway; what other objections are you working from?

Hysterical reasons.  The root filesystem is supposed to be static.

Once upon a time, I found out the hard way about a missed compile flag for
bash on a linux box that made sh/bash dynamic.  Imagine my suprise when
one day, in single user mode, I couldn't start a shell.  Since then, I
have been reflexively "static" when I had cause to consider dynamic stuff
in root.  (-current is moving toward dynamic?  ::shudder:: )

Your point is taken though.  Since I am farting around here anyway, I'll
try the -Os flag.

Thanks for your input.  FreeBSD has been working so good, I really have
nothing to do here but try to make trouble.  Frankly, I need to break a
couple systems here so I can have some fun fixing them. :)

Later,
Jason C. Wells