On Wednesday 04 June 2008 05:33:53 Adrian Bunk wrote:
Complexity is a cost, you have to get good bang for the buck when you spend
it.
When I first started stripping down systems to make embedded masquerading
routers back in the late 90's (before linksys came out), I started with a Red
Hat install and removed lots and lots of packages. That's the approach we're
taking today, and I can say from experience that it's not sustainable.
I then wandered to a Linux From Scratch approach, building a system that had
nothing in it but what I wanted. Starting from zero and adding stuff, rather
than starting from Mt. Crapmore and removing things until the shovel broke.
Someday I want to do the same for the Linux kernel. When I started building
systems instead of carving them out of blocks of distro, I started with
a "hello world" root filesystem, and I want to make a "hello world" kernel.
Start with just the boot code that does the jump to C code, only instead of
start_kernel() in init/main.c have it call a hello_world() function that
prints "hello world" to the console using the early_printk logic, then calls
HLT. And does _nothing_else_. Then add stuff back one chunk at a time,
sstarting with memory management, then the scheduler and process stuff, then
the vfs, and so on. So I know what all the bits do, and how big and
complicated they are. And I can document the lot of it as I go.
Unfortunately, as a learning experience, I estimate this would take me about a
year. And I haven't got a spare year on me at the moment. But it remains
prominently on my todo list, if I decide to start another major project.
(Maybe after I get a 1.0 release of FWL out.)
The whackamole approach is never going to turn Ubuntu into Damn Small Linux,
and it ignores the needs of the people who don't want the /proc hairball but
_do_ want a ps that works.
Rob
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.
--
