I don't think there is any downside in having a bulky source tree -- it is the binary size which matters. And linux is pretty good at configurability -- any dri

I don't think there is any downside in having a bulky source tree -- it is the binary size which matters. And linux is pretty good at configurability -- any driver, and even many "core" kernel features, can be disabled and then they is no longer even compiled. Interestingly enough, this was common even in 1987 -- the original post also talks about configuring kernel to reduce binary size: > Sun kernel code was about 390 kbytes, even properly configured (as distributed it was 490k). I suppose someone could take kernel source tree and strip out unselected drivers, but I cannot imagine a good reason to do so.