Kernel symbol table usage ?

[Robert Bonomi]

Building an old-style monolithic kernel, for a minimalist installation, the 
symbol table file ends up being many times larger than the kernel itself.

I'd like to move it off to secondary storage, _if_ that won't break anyting. 
Obviously, for crash dump analysis, one needs to have it available, but I'd
be doing that on a different machine, with much larger storage available.

Thus the question -- does anything in a system that _doesn't_ do *any* module
loading (loadable module support is _not_ in the kernel) need the symbol table?