From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933688AbaEGNVR (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 May 2014 09:21:17 -0400 Received: from lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk ([81.2.110.251]:45019 "EHLO lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933140AbaEGNVP convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 May 2014 09:21:15 -0400 Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 14:20:47 +0100 From: One Thousand Gnomes To: David Laight Cc: "'Andi Kleen'" , "netdev@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "tom.zanussi@linux.intel.com" Subject: Re: A reduced Linux network stack for small systems Message-ID: <20140507142047.46012957@alan.etchedpixels.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <063D6719AE5E284EB5DD2968C1650D6D0F70CFB5@AcuExch.aculab.com> References: <1399328773-6531-1-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org> <063D6719AE5E284EB5DD2968C1650D6D0F70CFB5@AcuExch.aculab.com> Organization: Intel Corporation X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.8.1 (GTK+ 2.24.20; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > You may want some size reduction to run in 16MB, but it is not as problematic > as running in 2MB. > > With that little memory I wouldn't want to run anything that relied on > dynamic memory allocation (after startup) - except for fixed size data > buffers. You mean like µhttpd 8) Been there, done that and Tom in fact sent me the patches to port it to Linux from 2.11BSD PDP/11. You can do a lot in a very small space. Heck you can run a full 2.11BSD on a PDP/11 in 1MB, including network stack. You used to be able to build a full self hosting Linux 1.x on a 4MB 386. If you are using glibc and GNU tools it isn't going to work, but long ago tools were written which just did the job they were supposed to do at the time and were small and tidy. Programmers were expected to use shell scripts to combine them for harder jobs rather than be the one person a year who invoked gnu-wibble --format-sideways-while-singing --tune=waltzing-matilda Alan