First of all: I am not a great guru on kernel-hacking, so please
bear with me ;)
As you all may have noticed, the kernel is growing enormously in size,
and the latest kernel is approx. 9 meg. compressed, and almost 40 meg.
uncompressed. Wouldn't it be better to somewhat modularize the kernel?
I have two suggestions:
First, the kernel could be micro-kernelized, Having in the kernel the kernel
(kernel/, arch/*/kernel), the memory subsystem (mm/, arch/*/mm), the vfs
(fs/) and the ext2fs (or whatever root fs one may have), and the important
device drivers (like drivers/scsi, drivers/char/console.c etc ...). The rest
of the drivers could be separate modules, which can be downloaded seperately.
Second, you could modularize the kernel on source-level. Currently, you
_must_ download the whole tree, even if you don't have scsi, sound, cdrom,
isdn, networks, and you have to download 6 archicture trees, when you only
need one (ok, some people two or more). If you download a tree, unpack it
and remove, say, the net/ subsystem, the kernel won't compile.
It would be (or: Would it be) handier to make different trees, like:
- kernel.tgz (with kernel/, mm/, fs/, and all important drivers);
- arch_i386.tgz (and also a arch_alpha.tgz, arch_sparc.tgz etc.);
- scsi.tgz;
- cdrom_drv.tgz;
- isdn.tgz;
etc...
I hope you get the point. So all a average user needs to download, can be
reduced to 5, 4 or even 3 mb.
Greetings,
Kenneth Sarmaat
PS: Does anyone know the place of the kernel-penguin-patch???
PS2: If replying, please also reply to me, since I'm going to leave the list
(my mailbox is flooding ;(