System Size Auto-Reduction
This page has notes and an outline for Tim Bird's Linux Auto-Reduction research.
Contents
Link-Time Optimization
Talk outline
This talk will be presented at LinuxCon Japan 2013:
Title
Self-Introduction
- I am Tim Bird
- Now working at Sony Mobile
- Researching system size for many years
- Long background in extremely small systems
- NetWare Lite - file and print server on DOS in 50K (in 1991)
The problem of Bloat
- Software bloat occurs because systems are built with more software than is really needed for a given task
- Open Source software meets the needs of thousands of different systems
- Linux scales from tiny sensors to supercomputers (extreme SMP and high-end clusters)
- Linux supports many, many features, only some of which are configurable
- Software must be generalized for many use cases
Bloat (cont.)
- In desktop or server, virtual memory makes this not so important (for user-space programs)
- Only working set of program is loaded - pages are loaded on demand
- For kernel, all pages are always loaded
Tiny Distribution
- poky-tiny distribution (yocto project)
- see
- Good for testing and further research