save 600Kb

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: save 600Kb
started by: friedgold

Posted by friedgold on June 24 2005,13:48

From < http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lfs/html/chapter06/aboutdebug.html >

Quote

Most programs and libraries are, by default, compiled with debugging symbols included.

<snip>

As most people will probably never use a debugger on their system software, a lot of disk space can be regained by removing these symbols. To remove debugging symbols from a binary (which must be an a.out or ELF binary), run strip --strip-debug filename

I thought I'd try this with DSL 1.2.1 to see if any space can be freed. Since DSL doesn't include strip I made the remaster on my Debian machine. I copied the contents of the KNOPPIX image to a source directory and then used:

Code Sample

cd /path/to/source/dir
find {,usr/,usr/local/}{bin,sbin,lib} -type f -exec strip --strip-debug '{}' ';'

I then recreated the KNOPPIX image using best compression. The difference in size is as follows:

Before - 49237759 bytes
After - 48615540 bytes

i.e. a saving of just over 600Kb. I made a remaster using this new image and so far haven't detected any problems.

Posted by mikshaw on June 24 2005,14:10

Strip is also a very useful tool in creating myDSL packages. For example, the Fluxbox 0.9.x binary is 6mb unstripped, and only 1mb stripped

Posted by clivesay on June 24 2005,15:17

Quote (mikshaw @ June 24 2005,09:10)

Strip is also a very useful tool in creating myDSL packages. For example, the Fluxbox 0.9.x binary is 6mb unstripped, and only 1mb stripped

That big of a difference?!

Guess I need to revisit some .dsl extensions and see what happens.

Chris

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Posted by clivesay on June 24 2005,17:22

disregard this post. I don't think strip was in the net-tols package. Probably why I was having trouble!

Chris

Posted by roberts on June 25 2005,18:47

friedgold,

Thanks for sharing. We usually strip the binaries but the libs were not stripped and that is where the bulk of the new savings occurs.

Posted by ico2 on June 25 2005,19:14

COOL, maybe dslwse (name to be changed soon (see post)) could be reduced further in size by this method