LinuxCon: Kernel roundtable covers more than just bloat

Posted Oct 1, 2009 16:20 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: LinuxCon: Kernel roundtable covers more than just bloat by flewellyn
Parent article: LinuxCon: Kernel roundtable covers more than just bloat

I think the issue is defining 'bloat'. Most of the features that the unnamed priestess of Delphi has are also features that the various people running it have wanted if for no other reason than all the business case rules that require them to be audited. Now for ye-old hacker in the basement.. those are things that aren't needed ro wanted. Its going to be in the end up to the ye-old hackers to dive in and fix/remove the bloat to see if it can be regained. My guess though is that for mainstream Linux it will mostly be there for some time.

LinuxCon: Kernel roundtable covers more than just bloat

Posted Oct 1, 2009 16:43 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

That's a good point: there's no rule that says you have to run a distro-built kernel, even in a production environment. A customized kernel with unneeded features trimmed may help matters. (For instance, I have no need for most of the drivers or filesystems.)

LinuxCon: Kernel roundtable covers more than just bloat

Posted Oct 2, 2009 0:25 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Linus was talking about some kind of bloat that makes the kernel slower. I don't think removing device driver or filesystem driver modules from the disk or configuring out most of the configurable features speeds things up.