[LinuxBIOS] FILO with the USB

[bari]

Al Boldi wrote:
> bari wrote:
>> Who is or will be designing anything with only 2Mb (256KB) of Flash?
>> It's difficult to even find Flash under 4Mb (512KB) in high volume.
> 
> Even with 512kb you run a pretty tight ship.  And that's most boards today.
> 
> The idea here is to keep the LB-footprint as tiny as possible, and not to 
> bloat unnecessarily.  Just think about it for a second:  A multi-tasking, 
> multi-threaded  kernel just to kexec.  Wow, talk about bloat.
> 
> But, there is another way:  Have LB read the payload in raw from USB.

Eric got some pretty good results in stripping the Tiny1 Linux kernel 
down a few years ago. 220K compressed and 371K uncompressed.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/4/10

Removing all the error messages from the kernel removed about 300k from 
it alone.

Some recent projects that may be of interest:

Kernel Size Tuning Guide:
http://elinux.org/Kernel_Size_Tuning_Guide

Open Test Lab of the CE Linux Forum - results of testing the size of the 
Linux kernel using different values for configuration options:
http://testlab.celinuxforum.org/otlwiki/ConfigSizeTestResultsNutOct1

~3Mb (375KB) is about the smallest I've seen with recent kernels

I haven't even seen any ucLinux kernels striped down to this small a 
footprint.

Embedded Linux Wiki:
http://elinux.org/Main_Page

-Bari