Jason Thorpe [Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:01:37AM -0800]:
> Folks...
> 
> GENERIC has become absurdly big, ~7MB.

Old, slow, low-RAM systems will _always_ need some (cross-)compilation (no
matter, how small GENERIC you will provide, it will be always possible to
strip it, thus extremally fit it to a specific configuration; not to mention
the need to build world from time to time because of security issues). Time
is money, and if you take the issue seriously, you will get a fast, recent
build machine to support the old one(s) anyway -- and such machine can easily
load 7 MB kernel.

Radical approach to small kernels would be to put everything in loadable
kernel modules (just as some Linux distributions currently do).

Also a good thing would be to check, what is the size of each part of the
kernel. Then, you will have only to optimize the bottleneck (which, in this
case, will be of course least popular hardware drivers, which take most
space).

Take care,
-- 
Michal Pasternak