question about building a custom kernel

[illoai at gmail.com]

2009/12/19 Jamie Griffin <jg at koderize.com>:
> Hi
>
> I have been reading the handbook to learn about building a custom
> kernel, but just wanted to ask something about gathering information
> about my hardware before I give it a go.
>
> The handbook suggests the command:
>
> # pciconf -lv
>
> ...which I like because it provides a clear list of components I can find
> out about before I try to build the new kernel.
>
> On my system, this command does print out information for quite a few
> components, I just wondered if this information is all I need to work
> from or is it not an accurate or detailed enough representation of the
> hardware I have in my computer. I'd really appreciate any advice on how
> others go about this.
>

A couple of words of caution, based on the number of mails
sent to this list complaining about "things not working":

Always leave "device scbus" and "device da" in unless you're
dead certain you'll never use a usb drive (& you'll also have
to comment out "device umass" and maybe a couple of others
to make it compile) among other things.

"device miibus" should be left in too, again unless you really
know for certain you don't need it.

You may as well toss in "device drm" and the specific drm
driver for your graphics card while you're going to the trouble.

You aren't going to gain much in speed or size savings, so
do take care to understand what you hope to gain.  If you
wish to shorten kernel compile times and reduce the size of
/boot, have a look at the MODULES_OVERRIDE and
WITHOUT_MODULES variables in /etc/make.conf.  That
said, good luck, I haven't had any serious problems and I've
been using custom kernels since FreeBSD 4.1 or so.

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