Shrinking the kernel for the unspeakably lazy and inept?

[thegoonden]

Out of pure curiosity (and diminishing disk space on me laptop), is there any shortcut to paring down the kernel a bit. genkernel, does exactly what it should, and makes modules for everything. Apart from me going into make menuconfig like a Dalek with a chilli pepper up it's waste port, and exterminating modules by the dozen (which always leads to me killing something critical that seems unimportant, and then spending rather a long time figuring out what), is there a way to trim down it's output?

Is there some method for spotting modules that have never been loaded and yanking them from the config? Or perhaps a way of making a config based on what's loaded at a particular time? (a risky one).


Or do I still have to do things by hand? I mean it was easy back on 2.1.14 or whatever, back then you just had to decide if you wanted to support the filesystem / was on or not....but in 2.6.30 I have to work out if I need matter replication support on my flummytron gizmomatic9000 or if I'd like to configure my flux capacitor in kernel or user space.
I pride myself on being the proof that a 100% codetard can use Linux.....nearly 10 years in and I'm still rolling, don't let me derail now


(think of the horror to be inflicted on /usr/src/linux if you can't help.....oh the modulity!!!!!!)


PS: Not that I'm complaining about Linux's windows smashing hardware support......nothing gives me greater pleasure than watchin a winluser grep the net for a driver, while Linux just works the device automagically......ever considered that the gentoo livecd (or any other) ....in 1 minute, enumerates and assigns drivers to hardware, configures the drivers and copies essential files to a read-write filesystem.......exactly what it takes a windows install CD 90mins to do.....with only a broken browser, a virus propogation tool and a media player that's mystified by it's own native formats.

[sera]

Was quite funny your post.

However stripping the current kernel to safe some space won't help much. A few MB maybe.

Just removing the sources and modules of old kernels helps a lot more and they likely aren't needed anymore and can make up several GB. Check /usr/src/ and /lib/modules/.

Also "find /var/ -size +100M" and variants of this code can help identifying overly large log files.
Have you logrotate installed? The command finds all files in /var/ bigger than 100MB.

Do you know the tool eclean? It can clean out distfiles gentoo binary packages and the temporary space used by portage. It's contained in the package gentoolkit.

[cach0rr0]

sounds like a job for Pappy's Kernel Seeds

Reconfigure the kernel, make clean, and you'll be sorted.

http://kernel-seeds.org will get you started - plenty of instructions, not too painful to follow

summarized:

-dump your lspci -n into the page he has listed (which is also in my signature)
-snag the relevant kernel seed, rename it to /usr/src/linux/.config
-do a make menuconfig, select only what you need

I did a screencast that shows the process, here - http://www.vimeo.com/7733701

poorly planned so longer than it needs to be, but hopefully useful nonetheless.

At any rate, have a read through that thread in the first link, should get you started.

hth
_________________
Lost configuring a kernel?
paste lspci -n here | read Pappy's guide | watch this kernel config demo

[thegoonden]

Thanks guys, all really useful advice, very much appreciated.

Certainly the kernel related files are more of a space hog than the kernel, but there's also the issue of how



long



it


takes

to build all those modules on this yawntop

Thanks again.