That's great that the kernel has all of those new features, but I don't feel better knowing that the kernel is now 2M lines heavier than before.
Configuring only the code you need can bring the actual kernel size down to very small images. Configuring a kernel for a small embedded application takes time, but its well worth it. And fast.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. I wonder how many of those lines are really "kernel-for-real" essential code and how many are in various drivers.
the vast majority are drivers, there are thousands upon thousands of drivers in there which means hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
It's nice to have choices. It's also nice to have most of those choices sitting on your hard drive unused, rather than being loaded into memory. It looks like that's still what's happening with Linux.
If it's too heavy, there's always TinyOS.
I think you are being a bit pessimistic here, what could possibly go wrong compiling a vanilla kernel? :P
Now that squashfs is finally in vanilla, hopefully a solid unionfs implementation will make it in soon. Both have been shipping on livecds for years, but just never made it all the way upstream.