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From: msb@cats.ucsc.edu (Maurice S Barnum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX?
Date: 20 Aug 1993 04:43:13 GMT
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz
Lines: 51
Message-ID: <251kp2INN3c0@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
References: <55270001@hplvec.LVLD.HP.COM> <24gnu4$skm@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <24m779$b0h@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US> <BDC.93Aug15214130@transit.ai.mit.edu> <24rbb5$t51@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu
In <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com> mike@ichips (Mike Haertel) writes:
>In article <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> Martin.Kraemer@mch.sni.de (Martin Kraemer) writes:
>>hard disk with a size multiple of what you need for Linux. When I first
>>installed Linux (Oct/Nov. 1992), it was so slender that you could get
>>all the base utilities including cc, emacs and kernel sources into as
>>much as a 32 MB hard disk!
hah! I can still do that! well, I think, since I've never even
thought about installing emacs...
>This has, alas, been fixed in recent versions of Linux, which seems to
>have come down with a very serious case of The Bloat. I remember a
>time (early 1992) when the Linux kernel was under 25K lines of
>code. The 0.99.12 kernel, at 118K lines, is nearly five times
>the size. It does not offer five times the functionality.
Yes, but how much of the size increase is due to the several
filesystems, a bunch of SCSI drivers, the networking code (and the
accompanying ethernet drivers), and the 387 emulator that now
comes with the kernel? None of that is part of The Bloat, because
if you choose not to compile those features in, you don't get
them. And if you do configure the world, you deserve a huge
kernel.
I too have noticed that my compiled kernel sizes have gotten
somewhat larger since early '92. Maybe even twice as large
(system sizes are now about 430k pre-compression). Of course, I
compile in xiafs, ext2, procfs, msdos filesystems and (just the
way things have gone) either networking or the 387 emulator. I
have not noted the sizes, but I can almost guarantee you that the
patched-pl12 kernel I'm running now (or the alpha-10, which was
the last one to have 387 code in in) was not 5x bigger than
whatever the current kernel was in early '92.
>Similarly, things like the full SLS release have really bloated out--I
>helped a friend install SLS last fall, and the full installation with
>X came in at around 40 Megs. Just recently tried again, and got
>upwards of 80 megs. Yeeow.
finally, as recently as 3 months ago, I had X (including the linux
xview package), a full set of development tools (no emacs), kernel
source, and various other goodies installed on a little under
30mb on the /usr partition. I didn't use SLS for most of it,
though.
--
Maurice S. Barnum --- I consult, therefore I am:
Ask me, and I shall answer.
Believe me, and I shall laugh.
msb@cats.ucsc.edu, mbarnum@eis.calstate.edu, mbarnum@nyx.cs.du.edu