I have an ol' OmniBook 800CT. A small, interesting computer, for its time, extremely advanced!
Small form factor, but still a very nice keyboard, something unmatched on modern netbooks. The unique pop-out mouse. The series started out with 386 processor, b&w display and ROM expansions.
The 800CT is one of the latest models: same form factor, SCSI connector, but color screen (800x600) and a hefty Pentium 133Mhz!
But only 32 MB of ram (the kernel report 31 of real mem, 24 avail mem)
Original 5.4 kernel: 9.2M
Custom kernel: 5.0 M
This shrinkage is quite hefty! almost 50%! More than raw disk usage, this new kernel boots faster and leaves more free memory. Enough more that X11 is now almost usable
How can this be achieved? essentially by removing unused kernel options. If you remove drivers which you know you don't need because you don't have the hardware (and won't use it, e.g. you know you won't plug-in a certain card in the future) then you configure it out, it won't be built and it won't get in your kernel.
On an old laptop with no expansion except the ports and the PCMCIA port it has, this is relatively easy.
To build your custom kernel, follow the
OpenBSD FAQ.
The main theory is to take the kernel configuration file, skim over it line by line it and see if you have the hardware, which you know by checking your dmesg. Dmesg shows which devices and drivers were loaded.Remember that you do not modify GENERIC, but a copy of it.
You can automate this with a tool called
dmassage: it will parse your GENERIC configuration and produce an optimal tuned version, however it will not work out of the box.
Why? there are drivers which do not compile if other drivers are not present.
I'm unsure if this is really a bug, in my opinion it is at least "unclean" code, however since mostly this kind of extreme driver-picking is not done, it is not fatal and probably won't be fixed.
If you remove all drivers at once, you won't easily find out one which one breaks, so my suggestion is to remove them in sets. One by-one is surely too tedious, since for each you need to make a build.
- remove X drivers
- build, if it works, copy the configuration file as a backup
- test the kernel, optionally, by booting it
- continue removal
Thus, in case of breakage, you can narrow it down to a less options.
If your mahcine doesn't have a certain bus, you may remove all drievrs attached to each. But proceed from the leaves, not the trunk: gradually remove the peripheral drivers before removing the bus support.
In my case, I found that an unremovable driver is:
et* at pci? # Agere/LSI ET1310
Remember that you are running an
unsupported kernel, if you want support for a problem, better try it with the original kernel, of which you should anyway for safety retain a backup copy during the iterative building process.
Addition:
In X11, which needs to be set to 800x600 8-bit mode, I had to uncomment these lines:
#Option "progLcdModeRegs" "true"
#Option "progLcdModeStretch" "true"
