i just wanted to throw some stones on the bloated kernel problem which is increasing
People used to be working on that, but then it seemed like the "size" got to a point that people were comfortable with it. Are you sure that
There's also a lot of pushback to things that add a ton of ifdefs.
just changing some build options would not make your image smaller? Letting people know sometime in the past few years that the kernel was getting "too big" for you would have been good to do :)
It's also an increasingly hard problem to deal with because the scale of big machines means the algorithms themselves in a modern Linux OS just don't make sense for a tiddly embedded router.
I know lots of people build them that way but if you compare it with one of the more conservative *BSD builds you have to wonder why not use BSD instead - especially with nanoBSD ?
(and BSD has the reverse problem - most BSD does not scale to a modern bigger machine of course).
Alan "1.2.13 was the last true Linux" ;-)