Putting the kernel on a diet

[semisight]

Please excuse me if I'm way off in the following post; I don't know much about kernel development.

I was looking through the GitHub source earlier, and I saw a lot of folders/files related to other chip architectures. Would it be beneficial to a) build time or b) run time to cut out what seems to me like unnecessary files? If this is our specialized kernel, it shouldn't need files for MIPS/x86/etc..

I realize that only patching what we need to makes keeping in sync/updating the kernel to future versions easier. But it shouldn't be that hard to make a script that just cuts out the cruft before compiling?

[gladoscc]

Hmm, I'm not sure if anything else other than the size of the OS would be affected.

[bitcrafter]

I think that the configuration step declares the  features, e.g. in pseudocode, ARCHITECTURE = ARM11

and then the  MIPS and Alpha and 8088  ... whatever other  architecture code is ignored in the next step, so it's not compiled.  So I think only the sources are fluffy, not the executable kernel.

I'm not a kernel hacker either. I could be wrong.

[kendall15]

I would think that bitcrafter is correct. Unless the pi kernel is different then any other embed distribution as all that I have seen will only compile what is needed for it's architecture type.