Why does /lib/modules take up so much space?

[mi_unixbird]

[Buffoon]

My modules are 26 MB, but I clean it up every now and then. And I build majority of functionality into kernel.

[mi_unixbird]

How do you clean it up? Is there some functionality for that?

[kite14]

[mi_unixbird]

Ah, well, no, these are the modules for the current version only, in particular kernel/drivers seem to take up the vast majority of the space, anything I did wrong during compilation?

[mv]

These numbers are really unbelievable. For instance, I have only 8MB (though xz-compressed, but neveretheless...).
Do you have only *.ko files in there?
Even if you do strange this like adding debugging information, I think that it is almost impossible to come to >99MB altogether for one kernel.

The nvidia graphics driver (if you use it) takes a lot of space, but everythnig else should be small...

[kite14]

Oh, sorry... I didn't pay attention to the second code block in your first post.
Where did you start to strip down your .config from? I used to start from one of
pappy's kernel seed and never came across such a problem.

[mi_unixbird]

[mi_unixbird]

[mi_unixbird]

Looking into .config manually by the way, no line ends on =n, is this normal or are the not included lines just omitted? Everything is either =m or =y.

[kite14]

[kite14]

How many modules have been enabled in your .config?
My .config:

[mi_unixbird]

[Hu]

For future reference, that pipeline is inefficient. You can feed the file directly to grep, and if all you want is a line count, grep can do that too.

Very bad: cat file | grep expr | wc -l
Less bad: grep expr file | wc -l
Good: grep -c expr file

[ct85711]

I do have to say, that is a rather big modules directory, especialy just for one kernel. On my system, I get this

[mi_unixbird]

Yeah, so, I found out that even if I completely delete (back up) the /usr/src/linux-4.0.5-gentoo folder, remerge the sources and do "make menuconfig" it plants a .config identical to the old one that is on some remote part on another filesystem in my home directory. So I guess the reason it's so bloated is because it found something weird from another kernel. I installed Gentoo not from a live environment but from a working debian one in xorg which has given me more problems than it was worth thusfar I have to say, the installation guide while saying it is possible often seems to assume you use a minimal live environment, some parts of the actual working environment do pollute it.

So I did "make defconfig", guess what, only 17 modules now and 50 MiB now.

[jonathan183]

It has nothing to do with the running kernel or another distro installed on a separate partition.

The config is pulled in when you emerge the kernel sources, if you already have a .config in the folder it will not be overwritten by default when you re-emerge.

It sounds as though you are much closer to what you require ... personally I prefer to only enable the things I need, if it's on new hardware then sometimes I'll emerge genkernel and then build a manually configured kernel once I get the system to boot. It also gives me a fallback kernel to boot from incase I manage to screw up the current kernel config

[mi_unixbird]

[kite14]

[mi_unixbird]

[kite14]