[klibc] initramfs howto

[Daniel Thaler]

Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
> please kill the part about glibc being to big and replace it
> with some moderate sentence like "most people prefer a small
> initramfs and thus want a libc optimized for size like klibc
> which is considereably smaller than glibc".
> 
> I have 160MB+ (compressed) initramfs with absolutely no problems,
> containing everything I could possibly ever need, and that is
> very, very, very nice to have. porting several hundred applications
> to klibc would not make the end result significantly smaller and only
> waste a lot of time.
> 
> "but glibc is _way_ too big" is simply wrong, there is no _technical_
> reason why it is too big. please present the benefits and tradeoffs
> with pure technical arguments (size versus the need to port and recompile
> every app), and people can make a decission on their own.

What I was thinking about when I wrote that was using initramfs to move 
functionality out of the kernel into userspace. Once that happens everyone 
will have an initramfs containing a small set of utilities. It would 
increase the kernel image size noticably and especially _for everyone_ if 
thoses utilities were linked to glibc.

Do you like this better?
"Userspace programs need a C library, but using glibc would lead to 
(comparatively) large binaries, thereby increasing the kernel image size."

Daniel