thorpej@wasabisystems.com (Jason Thorpe) writes:
>GENERIC has become absurdly big, ~7MB.

>I think it's time to split the beast up a bit:

I am not sure how your proposed split is related to 99% of what has been
sold in the PC market in the last 10 years.

Your proposed GENERIC caters to a lot of the machines sold in the last 2,
maybe  3, years.

GENERIC_EISA systems without PCI have been pretty rare after the introduction
of the Pentium I.  EISA+ISA only was popular when 486en were popular.  And
after that EISA was mostly used in server class machines.

GENERIC_ISA is pretty old junk that was hard to scare up after around 95.

So, that leaves out all the PCI+ISA machines that accounted for more than
90 percent of the PCs sold in the 90s.  They are the ones you find still
in use or can pick up cheap and with have decent performance still.

I'm not sure that it is a good idea to sort of de-support most of the
machines that are likely to run nowadays.

I'm not sure your proposal will be effective.  An -1.5 i386 GENERIC kernel
I have lying around is 4.7MB in file size.  Somehow I doubt we've added 3
MB worth of ISA card drivers in the last 3 -4 years.  ISTR that the 1.3ish
GENERIC kernels were about 2-3 MB in size, and I don't think we've added
>1MB in ISA card drives between 1.3 and 1.5 either.

I guess you need to compile up some kernels and see what the savings
actually are.

--chris