[noobermin]

My immediate thought was to turn off the re-entrancy code, there has to be a #define switch somewhere you can use to disable it since you won't ever need that. That's the better solution, although using your own prng is also good.

Also, this seems to be suggesting they are in fact importing all of newlib with its malloc code onto their code which is...kind of a waste. Again, if they could throw that re-entrancy switch somewhere they'd probably eek out a KB or so for the code on their eeprom or w/e holds it. Again, the better solution isn't to keep using newlib with that shit turned on (lol) but then implement your own rand() which will take up a few more bytes in addition to the newlib rand() that you won't use, turning off the re-entrancy is all around the right solution, assuming they want to keep using newlib and won't roll their own (which is by far even better assuming they have the will for that and the time, although as you point out, you don't need a lot of the stdlib, basically most of stdio is out, str to int converters, and so on, it might be worth a future investment to have their own mini library).