For a presentation I'm doing this summer on FreeBSD, I thought it would be
cool to get the kernel sizes for various old flavors of Unix. I see numbers
for v5, v6 and v7 in the tuhs tree view, and it appears these versions are
complete enough for me to extract the kernels themselves. However, I see
nothing prior to that. The archives seem to be somewhat incomplete, but I'm
wondering if people have sizes for earlier versions. Later versions are
more problematic because they move to new hardware, instruction sets, etc.
For this graph to be meaningful, it would need to be pdp-11 only, though
I'm of the opinion more data is better than less. I'll also be extracting
the different V7 commercial kernels: V7M, Ultrix and Venix and the BSD 2.x
releases, but those appear to be intact enough in the archives to extract
data on my own. I've heard rumors there's a SysV for the pdp-11, but I've
not been able to locate images for that. I don't need the actual images,
just sizes with some reference for the source of the data. It's just for
one slide in the talk, so I don't want to burn a ton of time on it...
The larger picture is that I've written what's effectively modprobe for
FreeBSD and will be talking about it in detail. How it's like modprobe, how
it's different, how all the pieces fit together, history of similar
efforts, etc. Part of the driving force here is the bloated FreeBSD GENERIC
kernel.
Of course, I'll share the final report I'm planning on sizes with the group.
Thanks for any data you can provide.
Warner