Re: FYI: GRUB size reduced

[Thierry Laronde]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 02:39:26AM +0900, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:
> 
> However, I think it will be the best way to compress the most part of
> stage2, in the future. The size of pre_stage2 is about 86kb by default,
> and the size of pre_stage2.gz is about 46kb. Because the bootstrap
> code is 1kb and the code size of gunzip.c is about 5kb, if stage2
> decompresses pre_stage2 on the fly, the size of stage2 would be
> 52kb. This size is comparable to that of stage2 obtained by omitting
> many features in the tricky way, even though nothing is disabled here.
> 
> That is one of the things I want to do in GRUB 2. A plan related to
> that is to move the user interface from the core image to an external
> module (except for the minimal interface required for recovering). For
> instance, as the menu interface need not to be supported, unless a
> configuration file is found, the functions used for the menu interface
> can completely be removed from the core. This will reduce the size of
> the core image greatly, and, if we are lucky, the image will be able
> to be embedded right after a MBR (so you won't have to use Stage 1.5
> any longer). Because the empty space after a MBR is usually merely
> 31kb (the size we can use for real code is 31 - 1 - 5 = 25kb), this
> will be a big challenge!

The plan seems absolutely sensible. Worth trying !
-- 
Thierry LARONDE <address@hidden>
10, rue du Bel Air, 74000 ANNECY - FRANCE/ Tel : 33.(0)4.50.67.46.61
/home du SDF (Site Debian Francophone) : http://sdf.polynum.org/