As you might have picked up from others:

Whether to strip your kernel depends.

The main thing that you may gain from this (almost the only thing) is a
smaller memory footprint.  If your system has plenty of memory, so that
you never see the system swapping, then you probably won't benefit from
trimming drivers from your kernel.

If your system swaps a lot, my suggestion is that it's probably better to
add more memory (if practical).  If you can't, or if it's
impractical/expensive to add memory to the computer, then trimming the
kernel may help some.

The downside of trimming features is that if you later decide that you
*want* those features back, you have to go back to your old kernel, or
else build a new one.


Probably it's worthwhile, though, even if for no other reason than to make
you familiar with the process of building a new kernel.  You may never
need to do that, but it's probably a healthy thing to know how to do.
Stripping out stuff that you don't intend to use gives a certain amount of
satisfaction.  (^&


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu