Valuable to try to build a *small* kernel?

[Barry Gershenfeld]

>
>but if you say a small kernel takes less *RAM*.. well
>that is worth a lot.
>
>...how much RAM do you save by cutting kernel by 50%??
>
>just 100kb??? 2MB???.. I dunno what RAM a stock kernel takes up.
>
>CS

It seems to me that the "small kernel thing" really had to do with the 512 
KB limit
imposed by the loader.  This was dealt with by compressing the image, then by
modularizing a lot of drivers.  For all I know they've got loaders to 
handle it now.
But 2-5 MB for a kernel in 256 MB of memory isn't much of a dent.
Maybe worry about ram buffers that these drivers allocate?

Barry