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On Thursday 11 June 2009 09:00, Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Tom Potts wrote: > > Does anyone know of a piece of software to check what modules are loaded > > and can modify the compile script so I can compile small fast kernels > > for old machines? Or even new ones? > > This is essentially what I do when brining up a new system - you don't > necessarily save that much memory though, but booting can be a lot faster > as everything gets dumped into RAM at once. > > I have a quick look at what modules the standard distro has brought in, > but mostly use lspci to find out what's under the lid, then build a kernel > to suit. There is a lot you simply don't need to compile in either - easy > for me to do as I've been doing it since the year dot, but harder for > someone to come in from scratch these days though, but mistakes are just > time consuming :) > > These days it's quite frustrating starting from scratch too as there are > so many dependencies being wired in too - you find you can't disable > something until you disable something else, which depends on something > else, and that's a module, so everything else is modules ... > > Compile, install, boot. Bother. Lather rinse repeat :) > > But once you have the basic kernel .config file, you can use it as a > template for just about anything else, as in reality only 3 bits of > hardware change - disk drivers, network drivers and video drivers... (then > once you have something that boots and runs OK, you can fine-tune other > stuff later like the hardware monitoring, powersaving, etc.) > > Biggest problem I now have is getting rid of udev off a running system > that installed it by default. > > Gordon I haven't compiled a kernel in a few years - I gave up when 1/2 the options meant nothing to me and the whole config-config script took about an hour to go through all the option. I seem to remember making things a lot smaller/faster many moons ago and some of the 'optimised' kernels -netbook remix - seem to be a lot livelier and I'm sure its not beyond the ken of someone with a little experience to write something to check your system after a new kernel release and then build you a kernel wot do what you need and no more. Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html