TCCBOOT Compiles And Boots Linux In 15 Seconds

An anonymous reader writes "TCCBOOT is the first boot loader able to compile and boot a Linux kernel directly from its source code. It can compile and start booting a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. TCCBOOT uses the latest version of the TinyCC C compiler."

Comments

Re:How?

[vidarh]

TCC is an incredibly tiny compiler with practically no dependencies on the environment. It's based on a cleaned up entry to the obfuscated C contest. So you can safely assume it's using every dirty trick in the book and then some. It still sounds incredible though.

Re:TCC compiler

[TheRaven64]

TCC has a few significant drawbacks.

1. It is not portable (well, technically it is portable, but currently only has an i386 back end).
2. It only supports C (not a drawback if you are just compiling C, but a lot of projects use C++/Objective-C/Whatever).
3. It produces fairly sub-optimal code. The register allocation done by TCC is not very clever, and it performs no serious optimisation steps.

On the other hand, TCC has two huge advantages:

1. It is not GCC. Compiling your code using two or more compilers and ideally for 2 or more CPU architectures is a good way of finding some more obscure bugs.
2. It is very fast. The less time you spend compiling, the more time you can spend testing / debugging.