Read the rest of my comment, the Linux kernel is pretty damn modular as it is. Nobody forces anybody to compile all drivers ever written built-in to be able to

Read the rest of my comment, the Linux kernel is pretty damn modular as it is. Nobody forces anybody to compile all drivers ever written built-in to be able to load them from the device tree. But if you want to do it, you can, and that's great. If you don't you can still toggle your individual drivers and modules and compile a lightweight kernel. I think what the parent complains about is that the kernel is too dynamically flexible and that adds a certain footprint, in particular in terms of code size. That might be true but again, I think it's a good compromise. The reason execute-in-place is not super well maintained in the modern kernel isn't because the Linux devs are javascript developpers who want to break everything and reinvent the wheel every month, it's because it's getting rarer and rarer to develop linux-enabled embedded hardware using memory-mapped NOR as main storage so the focus moved elsewhere. You might as well complain about MMU-less systems not being properly supported.