[Gllug] Automating the build of a minimal kernel

[Nix]

On 12 Sep 2007, Martin A. Brooks told this:

> John Winters wrote:
>> To save re-inventing the wheel - has this been done before?
>
> I have long given up the idea of customising kernel.  It's too much 
> work, gives you very little, if any, advantages and bites you in the 
> backside far too often.

Oh come on, how hard is it really? Once you've done it once `make
oldconfig' carries it forward, and it rarely takes me more than fifteen
minutes to customize a completely new kernel for a new box, even if that
box has completely different hardware to any old one I've ever
owned. (Huge chunks of it, like the elaborate firewall and traffic
shaping config, can generally be turned on or off as a unit.)

My firewall kernel in particular is running a pile of local patches:
there's no way it would even boot without some of them (they're too ugly
to submit upstream, one was rejected, and it's not worth cleaning them
up: they're too locally specific). Even forward-porting the patches
is very little effort, thanks to quilt :)

-- 
`Some people don't think performance issues are "real bugs", and I think 
such people shouldn't be allowed to program.' --- Linus Torvalds
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