Has anyone given any thought to the idea of pulling kernel messages out of
the kernel binary itself, and using numerical referencing for them
instead, in an attempt to see how much space would be preserved in the
final kernel image?
What I'm thinking of is possibly a module (which could be compiled into
the kernel, of course) which handles the translation of numerical kernel
messages to their string equivilents, with a hook in printk to handle the
communication with that piece.
Alternatively, no textual messages in the kernel at all, and offload the
translation functionality to syslog, using something akin to System.map to
register the mapping of value to message text.
A scheme for making it easy for developers to hook into this would be
needed; a message "registration" mechanism of sorts, although in my
thinking, most of this would probably occur at compile-time, which might
make it difficult to accomplish.
I haven't even partially thought this out yet; this is just a few random
thoughts that came up during the discussion of boot messages. Feel free to
tear this to shreds. :-)
-- -------------------. emarshal at logic.net .--------------------------------- Edward S. Marshall `-----------------------' http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/Linux labyrinth 2.1.101 #2 SMP Sun May 10 22:34:20 GMT 1998 i586 unknown 7:26pm up 1 min, 1 user, load average: 1.10, 0.37, 0.13
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