Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Mon, 2 Apr 2001 23:56:41 -0600 | From | Michal Jaegermann <> | Subject | Re: /proc/config idea |
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On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 05:39:19PM -0700, David Lang wrote: > > if the distro/sysadmin _always_ installs the kernel the 'right way' then > the difference isn't nessasarily that large, but if you want reliability > on any system it may be worth loosing a page or so of memory (hasn't > someone said that the data can be compressed to <1K?)
After throwing away in a Makefile rule all "is not set" lines, as they are trivially recoverable with 'make oldconfig', what is left for an avarege kernel compresses to something like 500 bytes. Quite a bit of space left on this one page if you need more extensive .config. 'zcat /proc/config.gz' works just fine.
As most kernels around are NOT installed "the right way" I found that in practice separating configuration information from a kernel image is not even close to be semi-reliable on a longer run. Those who say "installation script", and similar things, assume that people compile kernels for themselves. This is undoubtely true for folks on this list; this does not start to approximate the situation in general and, it seems, that we really want it that way. :-)
BTW - /sbin/installkernel, as seen in practice, is not even correct for a general case with x86; not to mention other architectures. Writing something like /var/log/config from "init data" during a bootup could be another solution which does not take any kernel memory and still keeps all this information attached to a kernel image itself. OTOH we have all these tons of strings which show in /proc/pci output and somehow these do not cause such huge opposition. Yes, I know that 'lspci' was supposed to replace that; but it did not.
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