Re: NetBSD-8 kernel too big?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> My latest build of NetBSD 8 results in a kernel size of 24,964,488
> bytes.  Not sure if "kernel" is really the right term any more.  :-)

Indeed!

I had a similar experience recently; it was with 5.2, but I suspect
much the same applies to -8.  I wanted a kernel that booted faster,
rather than being smaller per se, but the actions were the same: remove
everything that wasn't found at autoconf time.

I actually wanted the resulting kernel to boot on two different
machines, so I did the union of the two.

The resulting kernel is 4147757 bytes, versus 13621772 for the full
kernel, as measured by ls -l.  size reports 3339691 versus 12349371.
(Hmm, I wonder why 8 is so much bigger....)

So, you probably could trim it back substantially and still have it
handle all the relevant machines.  Perhaps not this far, because for my
purposes I could also remove a lot of things like COMPAT_* and ddb, but
I suspect it may well be worth trying trimming it back.  I don't know
what made the biggest difference for me, but I suspect it was the reams
and reams of drivers I knew I didn't need.

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