[CentOS] Kernel building

Thu Sep 22 15:20:57 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 09:52, Sam Drinkard wrote:
> I have not even decided if I want to undertake a kernel build, but for 
> the sake of discussion, if everything happens to be in the stock kernel, 
> why, other than file bloat, would you want to build a custom kernel?  In 
> FreeBSD, you can remove all those devices and drivers that are not 
> needed, and, depending on how much stuff you add or delete, can make a 
> decent size reduction in the kernel itself.  I'm not smart enough to 
> know if there is a performance trade-off with a whole bunch of unneeded 
> modules or drivers in the kernel, but perhaps common sense tells me that 
> there must be some kind of performance hit otherwise.

Nearly all drivers are built as modules which have no effect on the
kernel if you don't load them.  If the disk space used by the module
bothers you, you can remove the unused ones.  The main downside to
building them all is the time it takes to compile a kernel which most
people don't need to do.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com