As for kernel source bloat, since you have many architectures, and
it seems like there's a new one every 6 months or so, and as you add the
assembler of the inital parts of this code, and other such, you're going to
see a big increase in the source size. That's partially what the diffs are
for, you can grab those changes, patch it in, do a little rebuild, and you're
done. If you were to take solaris x86 and sparc sources and add them all up,
drivers for all cards that folks have written, such as add on fddi sbus
cards, and various other hardware that linux all has native in the source
tree, I'm sure you'll have at least the same amount of source, and probally
see even more bloat.
- Jared
Ben Clifford graced my mailbox with this long sought knowledge:
> On Sat, 29 Mar 1997 Eric.Schenk@dna.lth.se wrote:
>
> > (Not to take away from Andi's point to much, the kernel is growing
> > and we should probably take a look at the reasons.)
>
> Has anyone ever considered making some form of linker that would allow
> compiled modules to be statically linked into the kernel, rather than having
> them as an integral part of the kernel source.
>
> Allowing them to be statically linked would allow them to be used during
> the boot process, whilst they could still be compiled separately (ie from
> separate source trees).
>
> Comments?
>
-- Jared Mauch - CICNet - jared@cic.net - http://www.cic.net/ - visit my personal page at http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ PGP DATA: bits/keyID 768/8FB07FA5 1996/01/23 <jared@puck.nether.net> Key fingerprint = 61 90 2E DD 7A 7E 80 F2 55 C7 48 23 10 CE 2C A7