Re: [IDEA] Developers: your opinion badly needed ! (Was: [PATCH] /proc/config.gz)

Kevin Lentin (kevinl@cs.monash.edu.au)
Mon, 1 Jun 1998 15:04:05 +1000


On Sun, May 31, 1998 at 05:34:27PM +0200, Riccardo Facchetti wrote:
> This is just a comment: I am conscious that we should have a way to
> associate the System.map and may be the .config with their image, but the
> answer must NOT be kernel bloat !

Most of the discussions lately have been about reducing the memory overhead
of the feature and allowing it to free the memory when it is finished. Both
patches have consumed less than 1K of memory at their biggest. The PCI
strings were much bigger than that, were they not?

> 1) make zImage (make bzImage)
> 2) cat System.map >> zImage (bzImage)
> 3) boot the new image
> 4) cat /proc/ksyms_internal will open the zImage (bzImage) file, read the
> data at the end of image and show it.
>
> - Data is NOT linked into the kernel (~ 130 Kb of data), so NO kernel
> bloat, except of course for the /proc code.

Which is probably bigger than the entire /proc/config patch :-)

> - /proc support to read the symbols from the kernel image and show them
> catting /proc/ksyms_internal

> - The running kernel must know the position of boot image: I've done this
> with an environment variable settable from the boot loader. For example
> now I have booted the vmlinux.old:
> boot_image_path=/boot/vmlinux.old
> Now the running kernel knows the position System.map data is saved
> to, so we know where to load the System.map data from

What about a boot floppy. One argument for /proc/config was that you might
be booting a kernel you got off the network or something like that. With
those kernels, it's often the case that you just cat or dd them onto a
floppy and boot. I always keep one of those incase LILO gets corrupted. In
that case, the kernel image is NOWHERE that the kernel can find it.

> - I don't know how to handle network boot, I don't boot this way so I have
> no way to know how to make it right

Fair enough. This is basically the same situation that I just picked up
before.

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