[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Kernel tinification: shrinking the kernel and avoiding size regressions

[Dave Jones]

On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 04:41:41PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

 > And I think we can also further break this down into the classes of
 > code which require root privs (i.e., like kexec), and those which can
 > be used by any userid.

In the brave new world of secure boot, we kind of have to care about
even the root cases now too [*], but I agree in the general case.

 > So perhaps what that means it that _these_ are the features which
 > require the most amount of paranoia and testing before we let them
 > into the mainline kernel in the first place.  Otherwise, once they get
 > in, there's always a chance that systemd or some other piece of
 > userspace will strict strictly requiring said optional feature, and it
 > doesn't matter whether we put in a CONFIG option to disable the
 > feature --- we'll never be able to do it.

This is starting to tread into the other thread about userspace
mandating 'optional' facilities, but is that even a problem, given
the proliferation of init's (taking the systemd example).
Yes, systemd "won" by now being the default in all the general purpose
distributions, but with my upstream hat on, I think we still care
about embedded systems etc that don't need anywhere near the
functionality that systemd provides.

	Dave

[*] oh god, ioctl.