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(the dietlibc is a replacement for the glibc, which aim is to produce
smaller statically linked binaries)
The use for dietlibc in the stage1 was clear because currently used
install process on x86 is from a 1.44 Mbytes floppy. On this floppy we
need to fit the kernel, modules (scsi and network access), and the code to
do the basic things to load the stage2. The only part on which we could
progress was the code.
As always, figures demonstrate evidences. Here are the size of the
binaries used for the cdrom, disk, network and full floppy installs, using
newt as the UI library:
- with glibc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 569448 May 15 15:29 stage1-cdrom
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 572264 May 15 15:29 stage1-disk
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 624712 May 15 15:30 stage1-network
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 720360 May 15 15:29 stage1-full
- with dietlibc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 169332 May 15 14:26 stage1-cdrom
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 172180 May 15 14:26 stage1-disk
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 198612 May 15 14:26 stage1-network
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 251764 May 15 14:26 stage1-full
The `stage1-full' binary has code for many things, most notably: data
decrunching (bzlib), archive extraction (in-house format), module loading
(insmod from busybox), PCI detection, ide and scsi handling,
cdrom/disk/loopback mounting, DHCP client negociation (redhat+grub), NFS
mounting (util-linux), FTP and HTTP transmission (redhat), pcmcia
initializing (pcmcia-cs), UI interaction (slang/newt); with use of the
dietlibc, the binary is only 250 kbytes!
Due to the modular coding, it is also possible to choose to not use
slang/newt as the UI, but a stdio-only UI. In that case, the binaries get
even smaller:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 104500 May 15 15:46 stage1-cdrom*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 107348 May 15 15:46 stage1-disk*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 133972 May 15 15:47 stage1-network*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gc gc 187348 May 15 15:46 stage1-full*
gc [Tue May 15 15:58:34 2001]
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