stand-alone, but static linked applets

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 5:38 PM, John Spencer
<maillist-busybox at barfooze.de> wrote:
> i noticed that the busybox binary is quite big, and i think you have to
> actually use *a lot* of applets at the same time to accomodate its memory
> usage.

This is only true for systems which don't support
page loading on demand - in practice, only NOMMU systems.

On all other systems, the whole busybox binary is not loaded
into RAM - only pages which are needed for execution of
currently running applets.

(This footprint can be reduced if there is a tool which can
record used pages during execution, and save this information
for linker to rearrange the merging .text.<function_name>
sections into final .text section. This should probably be
filed on the "byte-squeezing paranoia" shelf...)

> in the busybox menuconfig, i only found an option to build libbb shared,
> which offers the possibility to make standalone programs.
>
> is there such an option for static linking as well that i may have missed?

Unfortunately, there is not.
It can be useful, yes.

-- 
vda