Dear Kernel maintainers, As you may know, it's been years that Ubuntu is shipping a kernel designed for the cloud. Such a kernel is simply a version of the kernel that is stripped down for running on VMs. The point here is that VMs do not need all the drivers that we typically build for the generic Debian kernel (and if one still needs it, a fallback to the generic kernel is always possible). This makes the kernel binary package a lot smaller, and also potentially reduces the surface of attack in case of a security problem. For example, we wouldn't need ax25, appletalk and such, which are unfortunately automatically loaded in case matching packets are received by the kernel, and which have been proven to be problematic in terms of security maintenance. Most hardware drivers would also go away.
Since it is only a mater of *removing* some modules, I don't think adding a cloud / VM kernel flavor would be a lot of maintenance. Though of course, as I wouldn't be the one doing it, it is not up to me to judge the amount of work. Could we see this happening in Debian? Please let us know your thoughts. Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)
