Since Most Everythings's right with SCO Can we make it smaller?

[Ronald S H Khoo]

marc at jahangir.UUCP (Marc Rossner) writes:

> In article <204 at mnopltd.UUCP>, neal at mnopltd.UUCP writes:
> > I noticed that the Xenix 2.3.2 kernel is about 1000K.   The SCO Unix
> > kernel is about 2000K.   

> I thought that the advantage of Xenix was that it was supposed to be tiny.

Well, it's *comparatively* tiny.  It's *comfortable* to do useful work
on a 2 Mb RAM 40 Mb disc Xenix machine, so long as no networking is
required.  That's HUGE by comparison with what you needed to do useful work
under V7 on a PDP, but tiny compared to what you need for any comparable
386 System V.

> I also thought that I had a rather massive kernel on my ISC 2.2.  My
> kernel is 750K.  Are you sure you have your numbers right?

Hmm..  Let's see

$ size /unix		# SCO System V/386 3.2.0, no networking, no STREAMS
426840 + 70352 + 285236 = 782428
$ ls -l /unix
----r--r--   1 bin      mem       657193 Mar 19 18:08 /unix

Ok.  Now, let's check a Xenix kernel out.

# mount /dev/fd096 /mnt -r 	# SCO Xenix 386AT 2.3.2 N1 boot disc
$ size /mnt/xenix
240256 + 39492 + 82860 = 362608 = 0x58870
$ ls -l /mnt/xenix
-rw-r--r--   1 sys      sys       311531 Jan 12  1989 /mnt/xenix

Remember, this kernel is quite happy to execute System V/386 3.2 COFF
binaries, including ones linked against the shared libc.  And the
default configuration is for a small, non-networked machine, but it's
fine for a couple of people to do real work with.

OK, let's get the figures for a Xenix kernel with TCP/IP and configured
up with tape drivers and enough kernel resources to cope with 15-20
users, etc etc.

ls -l gives 860169			# yeah, I'm typing this in from a
size gives 390424 + 423636 + 0 = 814060 # cu(1) session in the other window.

I don't have the figures for an equivalently configured System V/386
kernel.  Someone else ?
-- 
Ronald Khoo <ronald at robobar.co.uk> +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)