Re: [Boost-users] Boost in embedded systems

From: Kim Barrett (kab_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-02-20 02:06:40

At 10:37 AM +0100 2/19/07, Peter Poulsen wrote:
>I know this sounds insane, but our developers are very happy with 
>boost (who can
>blame them :-)), and want to have boost available on our embedded 
>systems. We only
>have 64 mb of flash memory available for the entire system (OS, 
>hardware monitoring
>and applications) and I simply cannot get boost down to a reasonable 
>size. Am I
>trying to do an impossible task, or can somebody give me some good 
>advice on how to
>build boost so it has a more reasonable size?
>
>Of course what should be done is removing some of the features, and 
>I can probably
>negotiate with developers about what features we can provide and 
>which have to go.
>Which one should I try to get rid of first?

The most important thing to do is choose a single variant, which
was already suggested by Hugh James. Building in release mode with a
few libraries --without-xxx in the bjam invocation can easily get
you down to something pretty reasonable for that size of system.
As an example,

   "-sBUILD=release <threading>multi <runtime-link>dynamic"
   --layout=system
   --without-regex
   --without-spirit
   --without-wave

is about 1.9M on x86 with gcc4.1.

(I offer this example because I happen to have the resulting libraries
handy right at the moment, not because this is a particularly ideal
choice for such a system. We exclude several other libraries and delete
some other .so's by hand for our embedded targets; I just checked a
recent build and this part totals up to about 1M for powerpc.)

So I would say this is entirely plausible and not at all insane; or if
it is, we share in the insanity.