Re: Tentative patch: modularized disk partition systems in 2.3.99-pre2-5

From: Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2000 - 18:34:24 EST

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    Adam J. Richter writes:
    > The initial ramdisk is not a partitioned device, and it is
    > already read into memory by lilo. The program for reading the
    > partition table from /dev/hda would be on the initial ramdisk.
    > The same is true for root on floppy.

    IMHO that is a rather sick way of doing it. By doing such a change:

    1. you immediately force everyone to use an initial ramdisk,
       which requires the ramdisk code (which increases the kernel size
       by about 16KB), plus the extra effort to get the initial
       ramdisk into memory.

       Not everyone uses or wants to use initial ramdisks.

    2. you reduce the kernel size by around 6-14KB by removing the
       partition code.

    I believe that your original argument for doing the change was to
    decrease the size of the running kernel, and increase the loading
    time by a couple of milliseconds? (please correct if this is wrong).

    What has actually happened is that you have increased the loading time
    by considerably more than a couple of milliseconds due to having to load
    an initial ramdisk, and you have increased the size of the running kernel
    by 2KB, or half a page.

    I don't see that there is any gain here, sorry.
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