RE: Can I run linux without a file system?

Dr. Craig Hollabaugh wrote:

I can say that a minimum RedHat install uses 29,296 files -
382.020MB, debian 10,734 files - 67.428MB, my minimal root
filesystem 82 files and 4.8MB.

Hmm, my minimal rootfs is (so far) 7 Mb, (as reported by du -s).
Or, is this 4Mb you cite compressed?  I wonder because my
libc.so is over 5 Mb. (which I got from DENX eldk-1.0)

Instead of ldd, I used "objdump -x $library | grep NEEDED"
which has the advantage that you can (er, that I know how to :-)
run it in a cross environment, so I don't have to fire up the
powerpc just to run ldd on a bunch of binaries.  (maybe
there's a way to cross run ldd? ) Using that, I wrote a script
(just today, as a matter of fact) to scan all the executables
and their libraries (and links to libs) iteratively until it
produced a minimal set, then deletes whatever isn't on the list,
which got me down to 7Mb with busybox and tinylogin as my only
apps.  (It occurs to me now that apps using dlopen() could be
a problem, but those are relatively rare.)

Any hints or links to into on crunching down the
individual libraries would be helpful.

BTW, nice book.

-- steve


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"Cameron, Steve" wrote:

Dr. Craig Hollabaugh wrote:

quoted

I can say that a minimum RedHat install uses 29,296 files -
382.020MB, debian 10,734 files - 67.428MB, my minimal root
filesystem 82 files and 4.8MB.

Hmm, my minimal rootfs is (so far) 7 Mb, (as reported by du -s).
Or, is this 4Mb you cite compressed?  I wonder because my
libc.so is over 5 Mb. (which I got from DENX eldk-1.0)

Did you use ppc-8xx-strip on it? It gets rid of all that nasty
debugging bloat. Our libc is 1275512 bytes after stripping. Our
uncompressed ramdisk is 4879K. If you are realy hurting try rebuilding
everything using the "-Os -mstring -mmultiple" optimizations.


As for the original question "Can I run linux without a file system?",
If you don't need a file system, mabey the question should be do you
realy need linux. It may just be easier to make an executable to sit
on something like PPCBoot. (just a thought)

good luck.

	Conn
--

*****************************************************************
  If you live at home long enough, your parents will move out.
 (Warning they may try to sell their house out from under you.)
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Conn Clark
Engineering Stooge				clark@esteem.com
Electronic Systems Technology Inc.		www.esteem.com


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