[Gllug] Automating the build of a minimal kernel

[John Winters]

A long time ago, I used to build kernels specifically tailored to the 
hardware on which they were intended to run.  Just the right drivers for 
the actual NIC, sound card, etc.  On a dual PII 450 system I could build 
the kernel in about 5 minutes.

Nowadays the kernel is much, much bigger, and even the job of whittling 
down the configuration file is too much work to bother with.  I can 
either leave the machine for two to three hours building something based 
on the default Debian configuration, or spend an hour or so manually 
de-selecting the bits which I don't want (and guessing rather too much 
of the time) and save myself an hour of build time.  Neither way is 
terribly satisfactory.

It occurs to me that it should be possible to automate the process.  A 
script to check which modules have been dynamically loaded into a 
running system and feed this information back into the kernel 
configuration so that every module which hasn't been loaded into the 
running system gets excluded from the build.

To save re-inventing the wheel - has this been done before?

TIA,
John
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