New debug kernel installation mechanism committed to HEAD

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Wed Oct 20 16:19:59 PDT 2004


    I've committed the debug kernel work to HEAD.  It is possible to slip
    the Stable tag for it (I'm pretty sure) but I would like to delay doing
    that until people running HEAD get a chance to test it.

    I realized something very interesting while doing the work, and that is
    the backup kernel and modules created when you installkernel are not
    stripped of their debug info, which means that one will often wind up
    with 3+40 = 43 MB of *BACKUP* kernel and module data after an install
    kernel under the old regime.

    The new kernel install rules will automatically strip the debug info
    from the backup copies even while saving the fully debug kernel as 
    /kernel, reducing the space used by the backups from ~43MB to ~13MB,
    saving ~30MB, while only eating an additional ~10MB for the new 
    debug-enabled /kernel.

    So, believe it or not, for people who do 'installkernel' a lot with
    debug kernels, these changes will actually save you ~20MB of disk space
    in the root partition even though /kernel is 10MB bigger!!  Now is
    that cool or what?

    --

    In anycase, see the commit message for further details.  Additional
    make flags have been added to give you control over the stripping
    of the kernel's debug info, and a separate control over the stripping
    of the module's debug info.  Everyone should be happy.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>





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