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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:418 comp.os.386bsd.misc:721 Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!boulder!romeo!drew From: drew@romeo.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX? Message-ID: <1993Aug20.230456.16966@colorado.edu> Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet) Nntp-Posting-Host: romeo.cs.colorado.edu Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder References: <24rbb5$t51@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com> Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1993 23:04:56 GMT Lines: 54 In article <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com> mike@ichips (Mike Haertel) writes: >In article <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> Martin.Kraemer@mch.sni.de (Martin Kraemer) writes: >>hard disk with a size multiple of what you need for Linux. When I first >>installed Linux (Oct/Nov. 1992), it was so slender that you could get >>all the base utilities including cc, emacs and kernel sources into as >>much as a 32 MB hard disk! When I first installed Linux, (December 1991), it was so slender that I could get all the base utilities including cc, vi, and kernel sources into 10M of disk (the only error free partition on my 45M MFM drive). I also built kernels using GCC in 4M of main memory and no swap. However, Linux didn't run X, didn't have shared libraries, programs had to be compiled for either hardware or software floating point (which didn't work reliably), etc. >This has, alas, been fixed in recent versions of Linux, which seems to >have come down with a very serious case of The Bloat. I remember a >time (early 1992) when the Linux kernel was under 25K lines of >code. The 0.99.12 kernel, at 118K lines, is nearly five times >the size. It does not offer five times the functionality. In the kernel, much of the "bloat" is from optional device drivers that you don't have to install (SCSI drivers, CD ROM, XD disk drivers - about 20k, most of that SCSI) optional networking code (about 25K), and optional file systems (beyond ext2 as the unix filesystem - about 16K lines of code). Ie, for many people, as little as half the code will end up in their kernels. For the people who need some of those features (ie, those with SCSI disks only), the "bloat" means an infinite increase in functionality, because without it they couldn't run Linux period. As to weather the rest of the code increase is worth it : I'd say yes. That code gets you features like shared libraries, the fully unified buffer cache vnode based vm, VFS, a full 387 emulator, and other features that make Linux more flexible, faster, and cleaner. >Similarly, things like the full SLS release have really bloated out--I >helped a friend install SLS last fall, and the full installation with >X came in at around 40 Megs. Just recently tried again, and got >upwards of 80 megs. Yeeow. Again, a lot of that is optional. Personally, I wouldn't use Open Look, f2c, p2c, emacs, and many of the other programs included with it. When you start getting rid of packages like Common Lisp (2M), unused X servers (1M each), etc. the space used drops off rapidly. -- Boycott USL/Novell for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit. | Condemn Colorado for Amendment Two. | Drew Eckhardt Use Linux, the fast, flexible, and free 386 unix | drew@cs.Colorado.EDU Will administer Unix for food |