*BSD News Article 19795


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From: drew@romeo.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt)
Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX?
Message-ID: <1993Aug20.230456.16966@colorado.edu>
Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet)
Nntp-Posting-Host: romeo.cs.colorado.edu
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
References: <24rbb5$t51@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1993 23:04:56 GMT
Lines: 54

In article <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!

When I first installed Linux, (December 1991), it was so slender that I 
could get all the base utilities including cc, vi, and kernel sources into
10M of disk (the only error free partition on my 45M MFM drive).

I also built kernels using GCC in 4M of main memory and no swap.

However, Linux didn't run X, didn't have shared libraries, programs had 
to be compiled for either hardware or software floating point (which didn't
work reliably), etc.

>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.

In the kernel, much of the "bloat" is from optional device drivers that 
you don't have to install (SCSI drivers, CD ROM, XD disk drivers - about 
20k, most of that SCSI) optional networking code (about 25K), and optional 
file systems (beyond ext2 as the unix filesystem - about 16K lines of code).

Ie, for many people, as little as half the code will end up in their kernels.

For the people who need some of those features (ie, those with SCSI disks
only), the "bloat" means an infinite increase in functionality, because without
it they couldn't run Linux period.

As to weather the rest of the code increase is worth it : I'd say yes.  That 
code gets you features like shared libraries, the fully unified buffer cache
vnode based vm, VFS, a full 387 emulator, and other features that make Linux 
more flexible, faster, and cleaner.

>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.

Again, a lot of that is optional.  Personally, I wouldn't use Open Look,
f2c, p2c, emacs, and many of the other programs included with it.  When 
you start getting rid of packages like Common Lisp (2M), unused X servers 
(1M each), etc. the space used drops off rapidly.

-- 
Boycott USL/Novell for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit. | 
Condemn Colorado for Amendment Two.		       | Drew Eckhardt
Use Linux, the fast, flexible, and free 386 unix       | drew@cs.Colorado.EDU 
Will administer Unix for food                          |