Compressed printk messages

Summary

Compressed printk messages

Proposer

Tim Bird - Sony Network Entertainment

Description

Attempts have been made in the past to compress printk messages to save kernel runtime footprint. There is an option to disable all printks, but many embedded developers do not use it, even when they find the space savings attractive, because they still would like to see kernel debug messages.

This project would consist of researching mechanisms that could be used to automatically (at compile-time) compress the kernel's printk messages, and transparently expand them at runtime.

Related work

• Timothy Miller did some work on this in 2003
  • See http://lwn.net/Articles/28935/
  • See https://lkml.org/lkml/2003/6/6/207
• See also some ideas here:
  • http://selenic.com/pipermail/linux-tiny/2005-June/000208.html

Scope

Unknown - 2-4 weeks?

Contractor Candidates

None yet.