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Memory footprint

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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What are the typical size ranges you can expect for the Kernal. How much working memory does it require.  

My feeling is 2Meg for the Kernal and 4 Meg total for RAM should do it. Does that seem reasonable?
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I build out the file"vmlinux" 7.41 MB (minimize) 

and the kernel is 777kB after uclinux working. 

 

what about the relationship about them(vmlinux and kernel)? why not they are the same size?
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi mountain8848, 

 

> what about the relationship about them(vmlinux and kernel)? 

> why not they are the same size? 

 

vmlinux is an elf file and it contains lots of extra linker sections like comments and debug 

information that are not allocated space in your memory. For example, my vmlinux size is 

about 11 MB, but the allocated memory (in the elf) is about 1.3 MB. 

 

You can get a better sense for the amount of memory your kernel code will occupy 

by stripping the elf: 

 

$ nios2-elf-strip vmlinux 

 

Or you can just use objdump and add up the sections that have the ALLOC attribute. 

But note that this does not account for any dynamic memory that may be needed. 

 

Regards, 

--Scott
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