Re: [PATCH 0/4] support for text-relative kallsyms table

From: Arnd Bergmann
Date: Wed Jan 20 2016 - 06:52:27 EST


On Wednesday 20 January 2016 11:33:25 Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > The reduction ranges from around 250 KB uncompressed vmlinux size and 10 KB
> > compressed size (s390) to 3 MB/500 KB for ppc64 (although, in the latter case,
> > the reduction in uncompressed size is primarily __init data)
>
> So since kallsyms is in unswappable kernel RAM, the uncompressed size reduction is
> what we care about mostly. How much bootloader load times are impacted is a third
> order concern.
>
> IOW a nice change!

I think some people care a lot about the compressed size as well:

http://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt.git;a=blob;f=target/linux/generic/patches-4.4/203-kallsyms_uncompressed.patch;h=cf8a447bbcd5b1621d4edc36a69fe0ad384fe53f;hb=HEAD

This has been in openwrt.git for ages, because a lot of the target devices
are much more limited on flash memory size (4MB typically) than they are
on RAM size (at least 32MB).

Arnd