Re: 2.1 kernel bloat revisited

Eric.Schenk@dna.lth.se
Sat, 29 Mar 1997 18:25:25 +0100


kdp0101@hpmail.lrz-muenchen.de <kdp0101@hpmail.lrz-muenchen.de> writes:
>Here is some data from a 2.0.29-2.1.29 comparison. It was generated
>by sizean 2.0.29-map 2.1.29-map | grep -v new |sort -n +3:
>
>
>Symbol Old size New size Delta Change
>SHATransform 00006796 00000364 -6432 -94.6439
>[ A good guy :) ]

Actually, a bad guy, in another sense. This is one of the most
expensive routines to execute on the critical path for accepting
a TCP connection. (It gets called to generate secure sequence
numbers). If you shrink it down, you double the execution time.
David and I have been talking about what to do with this one,
probably we'll make it a compile time option to choose between
"small and slow" and "big and fast".

(Not to take away from Andi's point to much, the kernel is growing
and we should probably take a look at the reasons.)

--
Eric Schenk                               www: http://www.dna.lth.se/~erics
Dept. of Comp. Sci., Lund University          email: Eric.Schenk@dna.lth.se
Box 118, S-221 00 LUND, Sweden   fax: +46-46 13 10 21  ph: +46-46 222 96 38