On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 12:58 AM, Aruna Hewapathirane <aruna.hewapathirane@gmail.com> wrote:
The kernel tar file from "www.kernel.org" is around 70MB. but when i want to download the kernel using git it seems it's really huge. git shows 1% for 25MB. Is it how it should be or am i missing something?
This will download a local copy of the entire revision history (back to 2.6.12-rc2), which takes a couple hundred megabytes.
So what your experiencing is quite normal :)
It extracts the most recent version of all the files into your linux-git directory, but that's just a snapshot (generally referred to by git people as your "working copy").
The history is actually stored in the subdirectory "linux-git/.git", and the snapshot can be recreated from that (or changed to match any historical version) via various git commands.
You start with an up-to-the-minute copy of the linux kernel source, which you can use just like an extracted tarball (ignoring the extra files in the ".git" directory).
You can limit the amount of history you download using the --depth option of git. http://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone So for a very small download, you would do something like: $ git clone --depth 1 git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git