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Looking at the config file of Linux (that is generated prior to build) I found the following line:

CONFIG_BASE_SMALL=0

What does it mean? If I want my linux kernel to be as small as possible shall I keep it 0?

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  • This might help.
    – devnull
    Commented Mar 8, 2014 at 10:04
  • Have you looked through the source code of the kernel where this is actually used?
    – Anthon
    Commented Mar 8, 2014 at 10:12

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This option is the "opposite" of the CONFIG_BASE_FULL option, which is available in the configuration under:

General Setup
 -> Configure standard kernel features (expert users)
  -> Enable full-sized data structures for core

The help text associated with this:

Disabling this option reduces the size of miscellaneous core kernel data structures. This saves memory on small machines, but may reduce performance.

As for how small the savings would be, the patch series that introduced this feature says here:

The space savings for the current batch is around 14k.

This is not the sort of option you should be looking at on a regular desktop system (let alone a server). It's for embedded devices with real tight constraints.

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