On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Alexander Sack <
asac@linaro.org> wrote:>> * stripping /usr/share/doc out (but everybody knew that)
>
> ack. we plan to do that using pitti's dpkg improvements; last time they
> didn't land
> in the archive yet, but I will check the status soon again.
It's interesting to note that due to the fact that /usr/share/doc
contains mostly nearly-empty directories and tiny files, the
filesystem overhead may be a significant part of the overall
consumption here - I estimate about 20-30% of the overall space,
assuming a typical filesystem with 4KB blocksize.
If we have to keep /usr/share/doc/ (for copyright notices and so on),
maybe it would be feasible to replace each /usr/share/doc/<package>/
with a tarball? This would eliminate most of the overhead as well as
making the actual data smaller. Since /usr/share/doc/ is not accessed
often, and not accessed by many automated tools, this might not cause
much disruption.
CCed Martin who probably has thought about this copyright/space dilemma while implementing the dpkg goody i mentioned above.
[...]
>>
>> * stripping out modules for devices that won't ever be on
>> this ARM device
>
> yeah, this feels to make sense. However, I am not sure how to draw the line.
> Maybe this is something the kernel WG can take a look at and come up with a
> reduced list of modules?
Classifying drivers by bus, and throwing out anything that can't be
physically connected, such as PCI/AGP/ISA might be an approach here.
Also, peripherals which can only be connected to on-SoC buses, but are
not present in a given platform's silicon could be excluded. We would
still have to keep a lot though... anything which can be connected via
USB, for example.
Right. I had something like that in mind too and I think it's the safe way to go for our "standard" linaro kernels. I wonder if we need a process/policy that says what modules are needed to become an official "linaro" BSP kernel :).
Also, once we have support for hardware support packs vendors or people that want to create kernels etc. with even less modules could still do that on their own.
A more ambitious solution might be to allow for dynamic installation
of missing modules, but that's probably a separate project since it
would impact on the way the kernel is packaged.
Personal feeling on this is that we shouldn't go that far in linaro. But I would like to hear other opinions on this.