Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Kernel tinification: shrinking the kernel and avoiding size regressions

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 05/02/2014 02:21 PM, Luck, Tony wrote:
>> Sounds like something you could use tracepoints for maybe ?
>> Failing that, kprobes ?
>>
>> I'm pretty sure I've seen systemtap examples of this very thing years
>> ago, but who knows if they even work any more.
> 
> If we do head to a world where systems are configured with
> a subset of system calls - it would be useful for application
> packages to come with a list of syscall dependencies. So you
> could avoid much sadness from installing a package that won't
> actually work.
> 

This would also be useful for using seccomp to sandbox processes... to
simply not let them do things they don't have a legitimate need to do.

For super-low-end embedded systems, it makes a lot of sense to be able
to build a kernel with only the functionality needed by a small set of
fixed applications (sometimes only one process which runs both as init
and the application.)

	-hpa