System Size Auto-Reduction

This page has notes and an outline for Tim Bird's Linux Auto-Reduction research.

global constraints

 * overall idea: create constraints external to code, and use for optimization
 * rationale: can't maintain in-tree - too many config items
 * make the application of constraints automatic
 * use existing constraints to generate new constraints
 * constraints can flow between user-space and kernel


 * example: uid=0
 * constraint language
 * application by commenting out references (replace with 0 constant)
 * use compiler to find code references (via error messages)
 * eliminates problem with duplicate names (uid in different structure)
 * constant propagation (by, e.g. LTO) reduces code

syscall elimination

 * scan file system
 * create report of used and unused system calls
 * mark syscalls unused in kernel
 * arch/arm/kernel/calls.S (and arch/arm/kernel/entry-common.S
 * make sure unused syscalls are not __attribute__(externally_visible)
 * technique of asmlinkage_
 * use LTO to eliminate calls
 * results: 50K-90K

ARM stack reduction

 * 4k stacks
 * stack extensions

cold code compression
Report existing research

link-time rewriting
Report existing research

Talk outline
This talk will be presented at LinuxCon Japan 2013:

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