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Calling for Smaller Kernel Sources?
FrozedSolid asks: "I can understand that the kernel contains many drivers and support for a lot of platforms, but the fact that the full kernel download can amount to 32mb doesn't make it any easier to download with a 56k modem. Kernel patches are nice, but obviously only apply when you have access to an entire kernel tree beforehand. Is there a way you can download a leaner linux kernel source? Is there a place that carries sources for x86 only or possibly sources without some of the less popular drivers?"
Part of this has already been answered. If you just pick x86 (or PPC or Alpha etc.) the size does not change that much. The vast majority of the kernel is not architecture specific. That's a good thing!
I don't know of any sites, but let me say a few things. First, your distro probably has a binary package with almost everything either compiled in or a module. Barring that, when I used to be stuck on dialup, I'd get the most recent kernel and then download the patch each time. It was a pain in the butt, but not as bad as downloading the full sources each time.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It was devised to combat just the problem you cite.
rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/[wherever you want to go]
Thank you, TRIDGE!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
i have dialup as well and i got Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) it allows you to start a download overnight, and it will disconnect for you, whenever the download completes, this, along with a pause\resume feature make it invaluable for slow access over the net.
The last time I was poking around the kernel source SRPM for a Mandrake install, the stock linux-2.4.? tarball was in there (along with all the other patches they apply to it).. Your distribution may have the same thing. Unpack the SRPM to get a linux tarball, unpack that to get the source tree, then download and install the patches to bring it up to the version you want to run.
Granted, this doesn't answer your question, but it may ease the download times a bit..
download once
use the patches for incremental upgrades
problem solved
It only prefetches next/previous link rels, which would be little bandwidth. The only downside of this is the abuse to - in the background - prefetch ads to fake ad impressions.
I thought that recent gzip compressed files were "rsyncable", in that the blocks they consist of are designed to remain as invariant as possible given the slight differences in content of the files. See, for example, this patch.
W.A.S.T.E.
This is false. The Mozilla prefetching is only for pages which explicitly request to be prefetched by a or type construction- a slideshow, for instance, might use Moz's link prefetching (since the probability that someone will proceed to the next slide is rather high), but most sites won't.
Of course, they ideally ought to implement blacklist blocking for prefetching so people could exclude sites which use it in ways which affect network traffic adversely enough to be a worry, but my guess is that people won't start abusing it until IE does it as well.
I had the same feeling of shock when I first heard about it a week ago- until I read the FAQ. Remember- any large project like this is unlikely to make highly visible stupid decisions. You linked to the FAQ; please read it.