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TITLE: REDUCING PEGASUS STATIC FOOTPRINT

Author: M. Brasher, Karl Schopmeyer

Date: 3 Aug 2006

This readme describes how to build Pegasus for the smallest possible footprint.
It defines a number of changes that you can make to reduce both  the Pegasus
code size and class repository size.

COMPILER ISSUES

    1.  When using GCC, always use 4.0 or later. There are two advantages:

        (*) GCC 4 does a better job of optimizing C++ for size.

        (*) Pegasus limits symbol visisibility from shared libraries using
            special features of GCC 4.0 and later.

    2.  If you can't use at least GCC 4.0, at least try to use GCC 3.0 or
        better. GCC 3.0 introduced the -fno-enforce-eh-specs option, which
        reduces the object code size of Pegasus by 20%.

    3.  On 64-bit Intel systems, build 32-bit to save around 30% of the
        footprint (64-bit code is large since the operands are twice as
        long). This technique of course will produces slower code.

REPOSITORY SIZE REDUCTION

    1.  Configure Pegasus to use a binary CIM repository. This is done by
        setting the PEGASUS_REPOSITORY_MODE environment variable to BIN.
        This technique will improve the performance of the repository. There is
        a readme that describes this feature.

    2.  Configure Pegasus to compress the CIM repository. This is done by
        setting the PEGASUS_ENABLE_COMPRESSED_REPOSITORY environment variable
        to true. This technique will slightly degrade the performance of the
        repository but reduce size by better than 50%. There is a readme
        that describes this feature and how to set it up.

COMPILE OPTIONS

    1.  Be sure that the PEGASUS_DEBUG environment variable is not defined
        when you build Pegasus. Otherwise, you will end up with a much
        larger image.
    2.  Define PEGASUS_NO_FILE_LINE_TRACE=true to eliminate __FILE__ and
        __LINE__ macros from tracer expansion. This reduces the overall size
        by about 50k by not including the line and file information into
        the code.  However, it means the resulting traces do not have this
        information in the trace output.

     3. Turn off the compile of the trace completely.  The flag PEGASUS_DISABLE_TRACE
        will force the compile without any of the trace code.  This can save at least
        100k but means that there is no means to trace including the XMLIO traces.

     4. Define the PEGASUS_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE environment variable
        that causes Pegasus to build with -Os rather than -O2.

     5. Disable use of OOP.  This eliminates the extra use of memory that occurs because
        of the extra process created to load providers.

STATIC BUILD VS. DYNAMIC BUILD

Originally Pegasus was built with a series of dynamic libraries, one for each
source directory (common, WQL, CQL, etc.).  While this has proven a good tool
for developers the result is a significantly larger footprint for a number of
reasons. See PEP 253 for more information.  Today you have the choice of building
the dynamic version or a static build which results in a much smaller footprint.
Generally the static build can save up to 40% in code footprint.

The same basic build mechanism is used for both static and dynamic builds
with the choice being controlled by the use of two variables:

        PEGASUS_USE_STATIC_LIBRARIES - The environment variable
        PEGASUS_USE_STATIC_LIBRARIES if it exists will result in a static build.
        In order to determine which of the libraries go into the static build, a
        second variable is used in the Makefile for the libraries that are to be
        included in the executable.
        
        STATIC - Setting the variable STATIC=1 in the Makefile for a Pegasus
        component causes that component to be included in the static executable
        instead of building a shared library.

As part of the definition of the static build mechanisms into the build
environment, a lot of work was put into determining which of the existing
libraries could logically be in the executable since this means that they
are NOT available as shared libraries for use with providers and clients.

Currently the following libraries are in the static build as supplied with
the CVS Pegasus 2.6 checkout. Different users may elect to either add or remove
some of these libraries from the static build depending on their needs for
the availability of shared libraries for providers or clients..

        src/Pegasus/Server
        src/Pegasus/Server/ProviderRegistrationManager
        src/Pegasus/Security/Authentication
        src/Pegasus/Security/UserManager
        src/Pegasus/WQL
        src/Pegasus/ProviderManager2
        src/Pegasus/ProviderManager2/Default
        src/Pegasus/IndicationService
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/QueryCapabilitiesProvider
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/NamespaceProvider
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/Statistic
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/UserAuthProvider
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/InteropProvider
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/ConfigSettingProvider
        src/Pegasus/ControlProviders/ProviderRegistrationProvider
        src/Pegasus/Repository
        src/Pegasus/ExportServer
        src/Pegasus/HandlerService
        src/Pegasus/Query/QueryExpression
        src/Pegasus/Query/QueryCommon
        src/Pegasus/CQL
        src/Service

NOTE: To see this list for yourself, grep -r Makefiles for STATIC=1.
NOTE: This list may change with time.

The components that remain dynamic libraries with are as follows:

       src/Pegasus/Common
       src/Pegasus/Client
       src/Pegasus/Config
       src/Pegasus/Provider

This list represents the libraries required by providers.

Building with the static build options does result in static builds for the client
utilities which might include the static libraries which means that some client
utilities could be significantly larger.

Today you only gain if you do not use the out-of-process providers (OOP) feature
because if you build static, the resulting remote agent is effectivly as large
as the server because of all the static libraries that must be built into it.

The steps to create a static build instead of the dynamic build:


    1. Set the PEGASUS_USE_STATIC_LIBRARIES environment variable to true to
        cause Pegasus to use static libraries where appropriate (rather than
        dynamic libraries).
        

    2. Rebuild Pegasus. This will create a single executable for the server
       and dynamic libraries for those components not defined to be included
       in the static build.