Re: Optional crunchgen base (Was: Postfix and local mail delivery - still relevant in 2020?)

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 at 18:35, Greg A. Woods <woods%planix.com@localhost> wrote:
> [...]
> Now I don't know what your storage situation is on your VAXen, but if
> you can possibly afford to static-link your build you'll find things
> start so much faster you'll be VERY surprised.

I built a static linked NetBSD vax a while back and iirc it was
significant faster (but too big to fit on any disk I had so I did most
of the tests under simh, so ymmv)

> Static linked those two programs are just:
>
> # size /usr/libexec/postfix/master /usr/libexec/postfix/qmgr
>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
>  674331    4428   42840  721599   b02bf /usr/libexec/postfix/master
> 4219996   26140   53016 4299152  419990 /usr/libexec/postfix/qmgr
>
> So, one is indeed quite large, but not huge by today's standards.
>
> A complete static-build for i386 is 1.8G (that's everything but tests,
> debug, and x11).
>
> Now ideally what I want to do for embedded systems is static-link every
> binary into one crunchgen binary.  I've done this for 5.2 on i386, and
> the whole base system (or most of it, no compiler, tests, or x11; and no
> ntpd or named or postfix) is just 7.4MB compressed.  Yes, just 7.4
> megabytes:
> [...]
> To really make this useful for general NetBSD builds will take some more
> hacking on the build system (basically it might go something like always
> building a ".cro" file for every program possible, then generating a
> crunchgen config to link them all together and generate an mtree file to
> generate all the (sym)links; and possibly doing it on a per-set basis
> (e.g. one binary for base, one for the toolchain, one for x11, or
> something like that).

Would it be possible to persuade you to take a look at this for
current NetBSD? If it was possible to build base like this it would
give an opportunity for people to test on a variety of older and
memory constrained boxes...

Maybe I could buy you a few dozen cups of coffee or beverage of choice
as a start? :-p

Thanks

David