Linux Tiny

Introduction
The linux-tiny patchset is a series of patches against the 2.6 mainline Linux kernel to reduce its memory and disk footprint, as well as to add features to aid working on small systems. Target users are developers of embedded system and users of small or legacy machines such as 386s and handhelds.

Resources

 * Project home page: Linux Tiny
 * Project mailing list: Mailing List
 * A Linux Weekly News article about the project is at: LWN Article
 * [[Image:Alert.gif]] - Linux-tiny Presentation by Matt Mackall, delivered at CELF's Technical Conference in 2005.

Original Announcements and e-mail
The original (Dec 11, 2003) announcement about the patchset, to the kernel mailing list, is available here:
 * Announcement

Here are some other announcements from Matt Mackall to LKML:
 * 2.6.0-tiny1 Dec 27, 2003
 * 2.6.1-rc1-tin1 Jan 2, 2004
 * 2.6.1-rc1-tiny2 Jan 6, 2004

Recent discussion thread on lkml is summarized at: LKML Thread Summary The thread is available at here

Note that currently, the smallest kernel that is reported in this thread is 197K compressed.

Last release (for 2.6.22.1)
A recent Linux-tiny patchset release is available here: [[Media:Tiny-quilt-2.6.22.1-1.tar.gz]]

Installation Instructions
These instructions were for the Linux-tiny release for 2.6.22-rc2. Adjust accordingly for a different kernel version.

To apply the above patches, you need the referenced kernel (2.6.22-rc7) and quilt. Follow these steps:
 * wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.21.tar.bz2
 * tar -xjf linux-2.6.21.tar.bz2
 * wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/patch-2.6.22-rc7.bz2
 * bunzip2 patch-2.6.22-rc7.bz2
 * wget http://elinux.org/images/6/6d/Tiny-quilt-2.6.22-rc7-1.tar.gz
 * cd linux-2.6.21
 * patch -p1 <../patch-2.6.22-rc7
 * tar -xzf ../Tiny-quilt-2.6.22-rc7-1.tar.gz
 * quilt push -a

Auxiliary tools
Here is a short shell script for making a tiny-quilt release: [[Media:release-tiny]]

Linux-tiny for 2.6.16.19
Here's a broken-out patch set for 2.6.16.19.

See:
 * [[Media:2.6.16.19-tiny1-broken-out.tar.bz2|2.6.16.19-tiny1-broken-out]]
 * and some porting notes: [[Media:linuxtinyNOTES.txt|notes]]

Linux-tiny for 2.6.9 and previous
An older Linux-tiny patchset can be downloaded from: Linux Tiny Patchset

Test Project and Results
The CELF System Size working group has worked extensively with the Linux-tiny patch set. There is a script to produce a report of size reductions for the individual patches in the patchset, and results from various vendors about their use of Linux-tiny. See Linux Tiny Test Project

There are some miscellaneous usage notes at: Linux Tiny Notes