Re: Small modularization patch

[Andreas Jaeger]

>>>>> Jon McClintock writes:

 > Hello,
 > Attached is a patch  to glibc 2.1.3 that adds the option to build glibc
 > without some functionality. The patch adds configuration options to remove
 > Sun RPC support from the compiled library.

 > Why would you want to use this patch? Well, glibc is quite big. A stripped
 > Intel binary is almost 900k, and a stripped Arm binary is around 950k. In an
 > embedded system, this can be a sizable portion of the system's memory.

 > At this time, there appear to be only two alternatives to the GNU C library.
 > uC-libc, from Lineo, and Cygnus' newlib. uC-libc appears to still be in
 > development; attempts to build it were met with successions of compiler
 > errors. newlib doesn't compile to a shared library, and appears to be lacking
 > the system glue code to make it part of a functioning system.

 > I added options to the configuration scripts which in turn affected
 > variables in the make system and toggled macros in the code. These were then
 > used to conditionally compile sections of code.

 > I added options for the following sections of code:
 >         sunrpc - Sun remote procedure call support.
 >         nis - Network Information System support.
 >         nscd - Name Service Caching Daemon support.

 > Nscd depends upon nis which in turn depends upon sunrpc; disabling nis 
 > disables
 > nscd, and disabling sunrpc disables nis.

 > Without any options disabled, the stripped library is 950,172 bytes. 
 > Disabling
 > SunRPC support reduces it to 859,824 bytes.

 > If people show interest in this, I plan on releasing similar patches for
 > other parts of glibc.


the current release of glibc is 2.2 - as has been discussed on the
glibc developers list (read the archives via
http://sources.redhat.com/glibc) those patches will not be accepted.
But HJ is working on a smaller glibc, perhaps he's interested.

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs address@hidden
   private address@hidden
    http://www.suse.de/~aj