RFC: bbox 1.5.0?

[Denis Vlasenko]

Hi,

I tried to look at less visible places where busybox
in not as small as it could be, and removed a few big
bss buffers. This has no measurable advantage on MMU
systems (both data and bss sections are efficiently
handled with COW there), but for NOMMU it is likely
a noticeable improvement.

Current uclibc is rather good in this regard, except
for des.c module. I prepared a patch against uclibc which
removes ~70k from it. Apart from this, uclibc adds only
~10-15k of bss to bbox. Good.

With this uclibc patch and with recent bss reduction patches
committed to bbox svn, bbox with all applets compiled in, except
'smaller' shells (lash, msh, and hush), devfsd, selinux stuff,
more obscure fdisk stuff and a few other applets, statically
compiled against uclibc on i386, has the following size:

# size busybox
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 767902    1680   32508  802090   c3d2a busybox

Because of this, and since we started to get more mails
about bugs in 1.4.x which are already fixed in svn, I am
thinking about releasing busybox 1.5.0 before starting
any new significant work on busybox.

What do you think about this?

P.S. uclibc patches for des.c bss reduction are attached.
# size */*/des.o
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   4091       0   70760   74851   12463 uClibc.t0/libcrypt/des.o
   4491       0      32    4523    11ab uClibc.t2/libcrypt/des.o
   4476       0       8    4484    1184 uClibc.t3/libcrypt/des.o
--
vda
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