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Re: why debian - longer - kernels



On Sat, 2004-11-13 at 22:01 -0800, Alvin Oga wrote:
> hi ya
> 
> On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, William Ballard wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 09:03:25PM -0800, Alvin Oga wrote:
> > > stock kernel problems ... which is next to impossible to work for
> > > "everybody for every combination of hardware"
> > 
> > What would happen if you just went through "make menuconfig" and 
> > answered "y" / builtin for everything possible.  Would that make a 
> > kernel that could work with anything Linux is capable of working with?
> 
> not quite ... the problem is:
> 	- with "y" the kernel gets super super big by putting it all into
> 	the kernel
> 		- you killed off all those that want to keep
> 		the kernel small so that it fits on a floppy
> 		or those that want to have a complete linux on a floppy
> 
> 	- some exploiter will probably find a kernel buffer overflow
> 	in one or more of the drivers
> 
> 		- you made it insecure for those that do NOT need
> 		those modules in their kernel
> 
> 	- if you use "m" instead of "y" for all the drivers...
> 	the kernel is little smalller ... but you would need an initrd
> 	if you used "m" for ide or scsi drivers to boot your box

Or, you answer y for the relevant IDE, SCSI, fs & chipset drivers,
and m to everything else.  Then, you don't need an initrd.

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Ron Johnson, Jr.
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