Re: NetBSD-8 kernel too big?

[D'Arcy Cain <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On 2018-08-30 10:00 AM, Mouse wrote:
>> 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,

Faster isn't an issue for me as I don't reboot the machines very often.
Optimizing boot is for Windows.  :-)

> 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.

I have a dozen.  Did you have a script or did you just grab all of the
dmesg files and sort -u them?

> The resulting kernel is 4147757 bytes, versus 13621772 for the full

That sounds like it would do.  If it scales the same I can get it down
to 8MB.

> 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 can take out those as well.  Everything I run is built from pkgsrc and
no one fro our company is on site so ddb isn't very useful.  We have
people who can hit the reset switch and that's about it.

> 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.

There's all the audio stuff for me as well.  Even mouse is not needed.
Sorry :-)

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost>
http://www.NetBSD.org/ IM:darcy%Vex.Net@localhost