> Can you say "Increased context switching"?  Can you say "Performance
> hit"?  Can you say "NT"? :-)

Yes, yes, no :-) LKMs are like sharp knives with two edges. Effective
in combat and very harmful if handled wrong.

> Maybe what we need is something which will autodetect everything
> that a system has, gen a config for it in /sys/arch/$arch/conf/$HOSTNAME
> [HOSTNAME=`hostname -s | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'`].  Check, of course,
> for the compiler and the existence of /sys/arch/$arch/conf/GENERIC.

The automatic detection could do a first approximation of the kernel config.
Some things (how many users do you expect, would you like to run kgdb) can
not be answered automatically. 

GENERIC -autodetection-> $HOSTNAME.AUTO -interactive-script-> $HOSTNAME

I suppose most of the users would be perfectly happy with $HOSTNAME.AUTO,
so I don't know if there is a need/demand for the second step.

> # What this really comes down to is: do typical users
> # configure/compile/install an arch-specific kernel after install, or do they
> # just run GENERIC in production? 

The bigger user group you get, the greater percentage will run GENERIC
unless you provide som mechanism to do customization. A NetBSD "out of
the net" is very bare bones (good + bad), and some friendly
customization tool would be good, too.

Harald.