Re: DHCP client with minimal functionality and size

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

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Roy Marples wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 April 2008 00:25:33 David Laight wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 09:34:43PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 03:22:43PM -0500, David Young wrote:
> > > >         ~57k (dhcpcd) + ~10k (ifwatchd) = ~67k total
> > >
> > > IMO 57KB is still quite a bit for the client only.
> >
> > Is that a challenge ?
>
> I see it as such :)
> I've already re-tooled the DHCP handling section of the code that deals with
> client configuration so it uses code to access the DHCP message directly
> instead of a custom structure.
>
> But I'd like to gather peoples opinions on what size a feature rich DHCP
> client should be.
> Remember, dhcpcd is written purely in C. dhclient for all it's bloat still
> relies on dhclient-script and it's supporting binaries is as ifconfig, route,
> etc.
>
> So if 57k is "quite a bit", what is "optimal"?

        I think 57K is a good size for a full feature DHCP client.
        Certainly compared to the 350K of dhclient.

        Yes, it would be nice to have a tiny, minimal featured dhcp client
        for specific uses, but that is much less important if your main
        client is 57K as opposed to 350K.

        Is there anything dhclient does that dhcpcd does not? How about
        people migrating who have /etc/dhclient-enter-hooks and/or
        /etc/dhclient-exit-hooks?

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