kernel info question

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-01-25 19:08, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 January 2005 05:32 pm, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> On 2005-01-25 17:15, "Andrew L. Gould" <algould at datawok.com> wrote:
>>> I'm selecting CPU types in the kernel configuration file, which
>>> lists only i386, i486, i586 and i686.
>>
>> AFAIK, and I may be a bit wrong here, if you don't really expect to
>> move disks around and actually run this kernel on a 486-class
>> machine, leaving both i586 and i686 won't do any harm.
>
> Under normal circumstances, I believe you're correct.  In fact the
> GENERIC kernel has all 4 CPU options un-commented.
>
> This machine is old and fussy; so I'm trying to trim where I can.

This particular optimization (both i586 and i686 vs. only one of the
two) will not save much (at most a few KB of kernel size), so it won't
give particularly impressive results.  The i386 support (which has been
dropped in some time during the 5.X development IIRC), *does* have a
measurable impact on performance though.  This is why I suggested that
with both i586 and i686 you should be pretty safe :-)

There are other things you can trim, mostly in userland, that may have a
larger impact on the hardware requirements of the base system.  It would
require a complete description of the system from a hardware perspective
to decide what matters a lot and choose optimizations that may help.

> Efforts to install Win98SE, and 3 distros of Linux ended in failure.

That may be a result of other factors.  Not kernel size.  At least not
so much.