> My latest build of NetBSD 8 results in a kernel size of 24,964,488 > bytes. Not sure if "kernel" is really the right term any more. :-)
Indeed! I had a similar experience recently; it was with 5.2, but I suspect much the same applies to -8. I wanted a kernel that booted faster, rather than being smaller per se, but the actions were the same: remove everything that wasn't found at autoconf time. I actually wanted the resulting kernel to boot on two different machines, so I did the union of the two. The resulting kernel is 4147757 bytes, versus 13621772 for the full kernel, as measured by ls -l. size reports 3339691 versus 12349371. (Hmm, I wonder why 8 is so much bigger....) So, you probably could trim it back substantially and still have it handle all the relevant machines. Perhaps not this far, because for my purposes I could also remove a lot of things like COMPAT_* and ddb, but I suspect it may well be worth trying trimming it back. I don't know what made the biggest difference for me, but I suspect it was the reams and reams of drivers I knew I didn't need. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
