Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:33:14 +0000 From: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> To: "illoai@gmail.com" <illoai@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: question about building a custom kernel Message-ID: <20091219233314.000067f7@unknown> In-Reply-To: <d7195cff0912191146u405d5fb6kb4f4fbc88767c150@mail.gmail.com> References: <20091219161309.GA57855@bsdbox.koderize.com> <d7195cff0912191146u405d5fb6kb4f4fbc88767c150@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:46:27 -0500 "illoai@gmail.com" <illoai@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > While I agree in principle that compiling a custom kernel isn't usually worth it on modern machines, I recently gained a 65% disk space saving over GENERIC by bulding a custom kernel. Granted that was achieved because it's installed on a router with just 128MB RAM so I removed things like wifi and usb support, opted for "device mii" and added the PHY drivers I knew were used and added pf support, but it does show that substantial savings are still possible. Another reason for building a custom kernel is to add functionality that isn't available through modules, such as support for DTrace. -- Bruce Cran
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