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      1 Tips for a small system:
      2 
      3 If you only want server functionality (for example), compile with
      4 	make PROGRAMS=dropbear
      5 rather than just
      6 	make dropbear
      7 so that client functionality in shared portions of Dropbear won't be included.
      8 The same applies if you are compiling just a client.
      9 
     10 ---
     11 
     12 The following are set in options.h:
     13 
     14 	- You can safely disable blowfish and twofish ciphers, and MD5 hmac, without
     15 	  affecting interoperability
     16 
     17 	- If you're compiling statically, you can turn off host lookups
     18 
     19 	- You can disable either password or public-key authentication, though note
     20 	  that the IETF draft states that pubkey authentication is required.
     21 
     22 	- Similarly with DSS and RSA, you can disable one of these if you know that
     23 	  all clients will be able to support a particular one. The IETF draft
     24 	  states that DSS is required, however you may prefer to use RSA. 
     25 	  DON'T disable either of these on systems where you aren't 100% sure about
     26 	  who will be connecting and what clients they will be using.
     27 
     28 	- Disabling the MOTD code and SFTP-SERVER may save a small amount of codesize
     29 
     30 	- You can disable x11, tcp and agent forwarding as desired. None of these are
     31 	  essential, although agent-forwarding is often useful even on firewall boxes.
     32 
     33 ---
     34 
     35 If you are compiling statically, you may want to disable zlib, as it will use
     36 a few tens of kB of binary-size (./configure --disable-zlib).
     37 
     38 You can create a combined binary, see the file MULTI, which will put all
     39 the functions into one binary, avoiding repeated code.
     40 
     41 If you're compiling with gcc, you might want to look at gcc's options for
     42 stripping unused code. The relevant vars to set before configure are:
     43 
     44 LDFLAGS=-Wl,--gc-sections
     45 CFLAGS="-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections"
     46 
     47 You can also experiment with optimisation flags such as -Os, note that in some
     48 cases these flags actually seem to increase size, so experiment before
     49 deciding.
     50 
     51 Of course using small C libraries such as uClibc and dietlibc can also help.
     52 
     53 If you have any queries, mail me and I'll see if I can help.
     54