Re: idea: library support for grub2

[Bean]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Pavel Roskin<address@hidden> wrote:
> Quoting Bean <address@hidden>:
>
>> The biggest part is kern/misc.c, all are library function, many
>> function in startup can also be moved to library.
>
> It doesn't matter by itself.  If the modules linked into the the kernel
> image use most functions in that library, there will be little of no saving.
>

Many string and char function are rarely used, and the unicode
function is used only by some fs.

>> And with library,
>> symlist.c is not needed as well, which saves another 3k.
>
> Perhaps I misunderstand something in your proposal.  I don't see how
> introducing a library would eliminate symlist.c.
>
> We'll need a list of symbols for modules to use, whether those symbols are
> in the kernel or in the library.  In fact, we'll need two lists instead of
> one - one for the kernel and one for the library.
>
> We could use hashes instead of symbol names to make the symlist shorter (but
> hashes won't compress as well, so it's not a sure win).  We can enumerate
> the symbols - that would compress better.  Or we can resolve all kernel
> symbols in the modules and eliminate the symlist.  But it's a completely
> separate issue.

The reason for symlist is to export function from kernel, but we can
move the kernel to a module as well, therefore eliminating symlist
altogether. With library, we can walk the module list (including
kernel), and linked the unresolved function when generating core.img.

-- 
Bean