I agree, stripping the kernel depends mainly on what
you want your machine to do. If you do stuff that is
"special" from others, for example you have a server
thats only purpose is certain specialized tasks that
needs to happend very fast, it may be a good idea to
chuck out all the stuff you know that you wont need. I
have a kernel now that is 2,5 MB, and that is a
specialized kernel with some extra features included.
I think you might be able to get your kernel down
under 2MB if you try.

I recommend that you try doing it, just make a backup
of your old kernel to for example kernel.old. Then
when you make your new kernels that you test (if you
make several) just kall them kernel.xxxx (representing
a date), and make "kernel" be a link instead of the
actual kernel, that way you can easily just make it
point to one of your previous kernels if you want to
"go back".

But! Do make a copy of the config file as it is now.
Make your new one by copying the one you use now.
You'd be surprised at the amount of stuff you can
chuck out. You can really make some performance
improvements by doing this. 

Or, you could make the kernel really huge, and have it
set up to only work in kernel mode. I have one that is
25MB, wich includes a file system and a fair amount of
code. But that will probably not serve your purpose.

Just have a go at it. Good luck. Cheers!


Morten




--- Richard Rauch <rauch@rice.edu> wrote:
> As you might have picked up from others:
> 
> Whether to strip your kernel depends.
> 
> The main thing that you may gain from this (almost
> the only thing) is a
> smaller memory footprint.  If your system has plenty
> of memory, so that
> you never see the system swapping, then you probably
> won't benefit from
> trimming drivers from your kernel.
> 
> If your system swaps a lot, my suggestion is that
> it's probably better to
> add more memory (if practical).  If you can't, or if
> it's
> impractical/expensive to add memory to the computer,
> then trimming the
> kernel may help some.
> 
> The downside of trimming features is that if you
> later decide that you
> *want* those features back, you have to go back to
> your old kernel, or
> else build a new one.
> 
> 
> Probably it's worthwhile, though, even if for no
> other reason than to make
> you familiar with the process of building a new
> kernel.  You may never
> need to do that, but it's probably a healthy thing
> to know how to do.
> Stripping out stuff that you don't intend to use
> gives a certain amount of
> satisfaction.  (^&
> 
> 
>   ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.''
> --rauch@math.rice.edu
> 


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