[Solved] Moving a system to external USB drive

[steveL]

Nice work creaker :-)

I'd try -Os first in a low-RAM situation. The kernel has an option for it too (iirc it defaults on, but that might have changed.)

I add a couple of CFLAGS to get a slightly-slimmer build without using -Os, but I've never analysed the result. Just that when I only had 2GB RAM I tried most things to get it leaner, and I've been using the align flags for best part of a decade now (from when I was on 32-bit, where you'd use 3, not 7.) Never wanted to add that to kernel CFLAGS though: I don't mind if the kernel takes up a tiny bit more space (since it's so central, ofc.)

(As for adding CFLAGS to kernel build, which you asked earlier, there is a custom-cflags USE, but you don't need it afaict. It can ofc just be done at build time.)

Another thing I found really helped was lowering the debug setting to zero for things like firefox; though that was more about hard-drive space, if you're using any -g flags for any package, you definitely want FEATURES=splitdebug. (as well as compressdebug.)

It's all written up here. Feedback from a man of your ability, is always welcome.

[creaker]

steveL, thanks for reply.
Yes, Os is a sane idea. Not aware of what benefit I might get with gcc, but afair msvc reduced code size approx for 15% in comparison to O3.
Unfortunately Os does nothing with non-binariy files and I have a lot of them at /usr/share, so I'm looking for additional ways to reduce RAM usage.
The last thing I did was a rough rm -rf on /usr before populating RAM disk with stuffs from there. Since the system is read-only (if not forced to save changes), it doesn't ruins a setup. I just do this on every boot after mounting /usr: