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James Miller wrote:
>
> The -tiny tree is a series of patches against the 
> 2.6 mainline Linux kernel 

Patches?  That's leading-edge stuff.  The normal kernel 
tree gets tested/discussed/debugged by hundreds of people.  
A patch is different.  One guy gets a bright idea and does
a patch.   

> the -tiny tree contains over 150 patches,

150!  

> almost all of which are configurable. 

Oh, great.

> removal of printk, BUG, panic(), etc.
> HZ, swap partition, IDE interfaces, line disciplines...
> replacement for the SLAB allocator

That kind of kernel hacking doesn't appeal to me.  Too risky.
Also, I expect that such hacking is going to destroy much of
the superior performance you see in your 2.6 kernel.

> Linux-tiny by default will build a kernel practically identical 
> to mainline, but custom configurations with full console, disk, 
> and network support can be booted on standard hardware with as 
> little as 2MB of RAM.

It might be interesting to see what that default kernel can do
(if you would like to compile it).  Sounds like a better plan
than picking and choosing between 150 patches (some of which
might not play nicely with each other).

Cheers,
Steven