I think the keyword is 'optimized' hardware. If you know what your hardware is, then you don't need the thousands of drivers and utilites to manage them. This can reduce the kernel by quite a bit. Red Hat or any of the distros cant do this becuase they have to run on all the wild configurations out there. Come to think of it Windows could be reduced by 90% if we didnt have to deal with all the different configurations of hardware.

Costas

>While looking at some infomation from a vendor who sells Linux "optimized" hardware (laptops and such) their web site states the following about RedHat 6.2:
>
>... " modifies RedHat in many specific ways to provide the best possible portable Linux distribution. These include a customized kernel (half the size of distribution kernels) " ...
>
>So my questions are these:
>
>1. How can the kernel be cut in half?
>2. What would be removed, or diminished, to achieve half-size kernels?
>3. If this is possible, why doesn't RedHat do it?
>
>...just curious!