memory overhead and embedded Samba

[Luke Mewburn]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 09:10:20PM -0600, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:
  | On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 01:52:03PM +1100, Andrew Tridgell wrote:
  | > I've been thinking about possible new applications of Samba4 beyond
  | > where Samba3 has already been deployed. One possible application is
  | > for Samba4 to support very low memory configurations, so you can
  | > create a functional micro-server.

There's another resource constraint issue for embedded systems:
operating system/application disk space constraints.

Many embedded appliances have a limited amount of storage for the
OS image (which Samba is part of) -- e.g., 4 - 32 MB flash -- even
if they have terabytes of space for end-user storage.

Samba 3 is a disk space pig.  I spent some work fixing this in a build
that's part of an embedded software build.  The comparative sizes were:
	20+ MB	out of the box build
	16 MB	build tweaked to use a static library for common code
	3.5 MB	build tweaked to use a shared library for common code

I haven't looked at Samba 4 in detail, but the principle I used
should apply to allow the on-disk space to be smaller.


Side note: I find it interesting that Samba 3 uses an "automatic"
method to keep prototypes in sync, yet uses manually maintained
object dependency lists.  This is wrong-sided IMHO; I prefer to
maintain prototypes manually (easier to detect API/ABI changes),
and let the linker do its job in maintaining object dependencies...
I've had this rant before with various samba developers :-)



  | > The sort of thing I am imagining is a tiny embedded Linux box
  | > (something like the Linksys WRT54GS wireless gateway),
  | 
  | ...or the Linksys NLU2, which is Samba 2 on X-Scale on embedded Linux.
  | (Not sure if there's an MMU...)

The NLSU2 uses the IXP420 CPU, which has an MMU.


Cheers,
Luke.
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