[OLPC-devel] Re: wireless/libertas: miscellaneous fixes

[Jordan Crouse]

On 26/06/06 16:58 -0500, Richard Smith wrote:
> On 6/26/06, Jordan Crouse <jordan.crouse at amd.com> wrote:
> 
> >I build an initrd with wireless-tools, busybox and uclibc, and I only had
> >9k left in the ROM when it was all said and done.  Granted, there is clean
> >up to be had, but we're going to have to be prepared to pay the price for
> >having all of these tools hanging about.
> 
> This seems really fat to me.  When I first started with linuxbios many
> years ago I built a kexec setup that had to fit in 512k.  To make this
> happen I had to customize (read hack) the pcmcia tools a bit.  I had
> linux 2.4 + ornicco drivers + my really simple cardmgr/pcmcia tools +
> iwconfig + dhclient + kexec all in there.  I had like 500 bytes left
> over when it was done.

Well, remember that our kernel is about 600k since we have to
build in support for NAND + USB + wireless, as well as the associated
filesystems, and other sundry support.

The initrd itself is 320k. 

> How big are the wireless tools and busybox tools?

busybox is coming in at 205k.  I tried to stay pretty conservative in the
configuration, but if we decide to go this route, then the
original kexec-boot-loader binary will be re-implemented as a script, so
we need to carry with us the usual script utilities, plus the usual system
tools (mount, chroot, etc, etc).

All together the wireless tools are 164k.

Finally the shared libraries are 320k - we could probably kill off some of
those, and I'm still not sure if we're still at a point where static
binaries are still a win, size wise.

> Since you are building an image that kexecs into another image is it
> really necessary to have a whole lot of additional tools?  Its not
> like you can do a whole lot if it fails other than re-flash a new
> biosimage or kexec up whats on the usb drive.

I'll leave Marcelo to answer that more fully - I do know he is planning
a method to reflash via the network, thus the wireless tools.  Last time
I talked to him about it, I had trouble arguing in favor of the
single-binary-that-does-everything approach.

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Senior Linux Engineer
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
<www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>