Using upstream kernels...

[Nix]

On 12 Feb 2010, dom at latter.org told this:

> I've compiled and booted it, but networking doesn't work.  Further
> investigation reveals that there's only about seven modules, and the
> kernel config is set to build everything into the kernel.  But
> surprisingly the custom kernel isn't *that* much bigger than a
> typical Ubuntu one:
>   3968128 2010-02-08 17:14 bzImage-2.6.32.custom
>   3491824 2010-01-28 04:29 vmlinuz-2.6.28-18-generic
>
> Is that because it's bzip not gzip?  I'd have thought the kernel
> would be a lot bigger with all the modules compiled in.

That depends how much you built in :) if you only built in the hardware
you own, the kernel isn't going to be that enormous: nobody owns all the
hardware that gets built into an Ubuntu kernel (and not all of it is
modular). My vmlinuzes here vary from

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1401168 2010-02-09 21:50 vmlinuz

(a kernel for a Soekris embedded system, though not with EMBEDDED
defined: no virtual consoles though), all the way up to

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4688000 2010-02-11 20:58 vmlinuz

(the kernel for my 64-bit desktop, with Radeon KMS, RAID and initramfs
with fsck, busybox, lvm, mdadm, et al). The closest thing to a 'normal'
kernel I've got is the one for my server:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3969568 2010-02-09 21:57 vmlinuz

(with LVM, Areca RAID (so a 'normal-sized' disk driver only), and no KMS:
but even that has a ~500Kb initramfs in it).

Compare to the Ubuntu monster, 3941696 bytes plus an 8Mb initrd...