Minimal images: kernel config

[Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>]

I've been getting more and more questions regarding flash footprint, 
memory footprint, and boot time. All of these fall under the "minimal 
image" heading in my head.

Currently, poky-image-minimal is a simple subset of poky-image-sato. It 
uses busybox, but is still dynamically linked and uses the same 
somewhat-generic kernel build. By somewhat-generic I mean we have named 
features that often cover more drivers than are stricly necessary for a 
given board (usb-net comes to mind). I'd like to see minimal become a 
truly minimal image from both the userspace and kernel side point of view.

Here's my take on this. From userspace this means uclibc and a staticly 
linked busybox. From the kernel this means a static build (no modules) 
with nothing more than is required for the board's built-in peripherals 
to function, with the possible exception of something like usb-storage. 
I'd like to see a < 10M flash size and a <8M memory footprint.

Thoughts on this direction?

-- 
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Linux Kernel