Sunday, 15 August 2010

Linux build sizes - 6GB - insane !

Just compiling up a new Linux 2.6.35.2 kernel. By the time it had
finished, my disk usage went up by 6GB. Its really painful configuring
a new kernel (despite copying the old kernel config) - I am probably
doing something wrong, but I find it offensive the vmlinux.o - prior
to linking is 256MB in size (final vmlinux executable is 96MB).

I know most of this is debug symbols, but its a pain to compile and
find space in the VMs.

I wish the kernel linking phase was clever enough to optimise
and strip out most of this stuff. It really is huge.

(Yes, I appreciate /bin/ld and gcc do their best to optimise things
away, and I know it doesnt hurt performance, but its unmanageable
to be going from a 1-2MB kernel, to one requiring 96MB of disk space).

C'est la vie.


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