Small footprint
From Mono
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How to make a smaller Mono install
The most basic mono install currently takes about 3.7 MB of disk space, this includes about 1.7 MB for the JIT and 2 MB for mscorlib.dll. There are several things that can be done to reduce the footprint of the mono runtime. Here are a few hints and ideas:
- Removing unneeded features
- Removing unneeded data
- Compilation hints
- Reducing code in assemblies
Removing unneeded features
The runtime can be configured to disable certain features. A few of this are needed only to help debugging mono, or only on some systems. The flag to use is --enable-minimal=list where list is a comma-separated list of features such as: aot, profiler, decimal, pinvoke, debug, reflection_emit, large_code, logging, com, ssa, generics. So do something like this in the mono source directory:
./configure -enable-minimal=aot,profiler
to remove support for AOT and profiling in the build.
Note that some of the flags are currently not actually implemented, but it is very easy to contribute in this area: choose an unimplemented flag, patch the runtime with the proper #ifdefs, test the build with and without the feature and sumbit us a patch.
The Boehm GC can be built to suite small heaps better (usually if you want a small mono, you also have constraints on the runtime RAM usage). Change libgc/configure.in to unconditionally define SMALL_CONFIG adding the following line:
AC_DEFINE(SMALL_CONFIG)
Removing unneeded data
The runtime does include data to support locale handling and collation. To reduce the number of supported locales, go into the tools/locale-builder and type
make minimal MINIMAL_LOCALES=en_US make install-culture-table
and then run make in the toplevel dir to build a mono runtime with support for just the en_US locale.
Several KBs can be saved by removed unneeded collation data (FIXME: add details here).
Compilation hints
Make sure you compile with optimizations for size, this is done by typing:
make CFLAGS=-Os
in the toplevel mono dir after configuring. This can save hundred of kilobytes. Remember to strip the installed binary, too:
strip $prefix/bin/mono
to remove debugging and unused symbol information.
Reducing code in assemblies
To reduce the size of the managed assemblies, use the linker tool in the cecil svn module.
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