Linux Tiny Patch Ideas

This is an unorganized list of items that may be worth looking at:

Mark Rustad patch to remove init printk messages
http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/9/146

This change allows format strings in printks to be directed to an object section where they can be discarded at run time. By using "pkinit" instead of "printk" inside of __init functions, the format strings associated with the __init functions can be reclaimed.

proposals to compress printk messages
http://uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0306.0/1542.html - Timothy Miller actual results (using a compile time string replacer)

http://selenic.com/pipermail/linux-tiny/2005-June/000207.html

compile-time selection of printk messages, by message level
There was a big discussion about this on LKML in September, 2007.

See http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/9/20/352 (by Rob Landley) for the start of the thread.

make a PROC_FS_FULL
There's a lot of junk in /proc file system. If you turn off CONFIG_PROC_FS it saves about 130K, but it makes the system pretty difficult to use (e.g. mount has problems on init that you have to work around, there's no 'ps' is available, etc.)

Similar to how we have BASE_FULL and BASE_SMALL, maybe we can have a PROC_FS_FULL and a PROC_FS_SMALL. Only the essential items would be configured on with PROC_FS_SMALL, and everything would be on for PROC_FS_FULL.

The research needed here is to find out the list of essential items that 'ps' and maybe 'free' need, and find a way to make the others conditional on CONFIG_PROC_FS_FULL in the least intrusive way.