making a smaller busybox for the d-i boot floppy

I tried today to build busybox-floppy-udeb in some various ways to reduce the size of the boot floppy enough that a 2.6 kernel might fit on it. I thought it was interesting as a kind of one hour survey of the options for this kind of thing.

Linking busybox statically against glibc drops the total size by more than 120k, even when compared to the reduced size glibc that mklibs generates.

Amusingly, uclibc.so is ~20k larger than the mklibs-reduced glibc.

busybox FTBFS with dietlibc, didn't try to fix.

newlib is missing some functions used by this build of busybox (stat64, lstat64, mainly), Didn't try to hack this to get it to link, although the size of newlib (18k) makes it seem pretty promising if it would.

klibc is not in Debian yet, so didn't try it.

Since the winner so far was just linking statically with glibc, I tried linking statically with uclibc too. That was the smallest of all, 411k.

Unfortunatly even after all this the 2.6 i386 boot floppy for d-i ends up being 380k too big...