Re: [dev] Completeness suckless

From: Daniel Cegiełka <daniel.cegielka_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:41:19 +0200

pon., 12 kwi 2021 o 20:36 Sagar Acharya <sagaracharya_AT_tutanota.com> napisał(a):
>
>
>
> > I don’t think it makes sense for the suckless guys to try trimming down that bloated mess (Linux kernel).
> >

> > To be honest I’m wondering if the love they give OpenBSD, as a desktop OS, is misplaced. OpenBSD is 22M lines if you include the entirety of the files, and 16M counting just the lines with code on them. Granted I think that number is across the whole base distribution which makes it smaller than the Linux kernel alone.

Linux:

drivers: > 700 MB
arch: > 135 MB
Docs: > 50 MB
tools etc: > 42 MB
fs: > 42 MB
kernel? 11 MB!

What is your arch? x86? It's <15 MB. arm64? 13 MB.

>32 MB its 32bit arm.. Android? Can be deleted.

The only archs we may be interested in are x86(_64), arm64 and
power64. The rest is for cross-compilations.

Docs? Can be deleted. fs? ext4 is ~1.7 MB. Do you need heavy file
systems (xfs, btrfs)? If not, can be deleted.

Drivers. net > 100 MB. But do you need drivers for expensive
low-latency server network cards on your laptop or home workstation?
You can always compile such a driver outside of the kernel.

gpu >250 MB. In many cases it can be deleted as well.

So if you only choose what a typical user may actually be interested
in, such a striped-down kernel may be less than 100-150 MB or ~10-15
MB as gz or xz.

Updates? It is not that difficult. The rule is simple: if it doesn't
touch the remaining code, skip it.


> But OpenBSD is still REALLY fat

If I remember correctly, version 3.8 was the last one with the minimal
option. Later it was only fatter and fatter. OpenBSD is no longer a
lightweight solution. It's probably easier to configure Linux kernel
than to do a lightweight OpenBSD installation (perl for pkg,
clang/llvm etc). See sta.li/morpheus or Oasis Linux.

> compared to operating systems of the past. FreeDOS is ~50k lines, and then there are things like KolibriOS to consider.
> >

...and Haiku, Plan 9/9front etc. etc. Does it have drivers for modern hardware?

Daniel

> > I don’t know if you guys have seen this, but I’d like to share a video from YT that I think is appropriate for this group:
> >
> > watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
> >
> That video is pure gold!
>
> I'll revise my article wrt OpenBSD but it's the least evil when seen wrt usability. I doubt it's that gigantic though! How do you visualize the solution? Writing from scratch targeting an embedded board?
>
> Thanks
> Sagar Acharya
>
Received on Mon Apr 12 2021 - 21:41:19 CEST