Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 9th Oct 2007 22:07 UTC, submitted by diegocg
After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, SLUB is now the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.
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Member since:
2006-06-21
And who's going to load just the modules that are actually needed by the machine? Modules get loaded automatically when a program attempts to access the relevant /dev devices. Some of them need configuration (module parameters and device-module aliasing) to work. Who's going to do that? Teoretically you could design software that can probe all the /dev entries known to mankind and still not obtain 100% accurate results.
And in order to do that you'd need to do what distro's already do (put together a full kernel), except instead of leaving it there and using what you need, you attempt to conduct a complicated hardware investigation, error prone, with the end result of deleting the full kernel you went to the trouble of producing and using a smaller subset of it.
And for what? You're losing perspective. Just to obtain a more lightweight kernel? Why? What distro's do today makes much more sense. Provide the full kernel and make software that looks at the hardware and uses the appropriate drivers.
I honestly don't see what a lightweight kernel would accomplish. The only time when kernel size matters is on small boot devices that simply don't have the space, but there are techniques to go around that.