Hello everybody!

At the present I run Debian Sarge (with kernel 2.6.8-3-686, updated via Synaptic) on the ThinkPad 600X with 450 MB of RAM. A couple of days ago I decided to optimize my system in order to avoid unneccessary memory consumption (I run Gnome, so a bit more free memory would be quite usefull :-) ).

After certain research in the Internet I started to explore my kernel. I must say, that I initially installed 2.4 (default in the Sarge), but in the meantime I upgraded it to 2.6 - to enable HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). I had no problems with starting my machine with new kernel, GRUB was updated nearly automatically. But after carefull study of the /var/log/kern.log I found following message:
As far as I understand, it means that corresponding modules will not be loaded. Nevertheless, the system is booting and I work without any problems.

I have read a lot about initrd and kernel images. I read also the sticky post in this forum about kernel update. Unfortunatelly, I could not find (more or less) clear answer(s) on the following questions:

1) how does the above shown message influence the boot process? Can I resolve the problem without having a lot of troubles with my machine (which I use daily for my work)?
2) which modules can be excluded from boot process (and, respectively, from RAM) to improve the system's performance?

If it will be neccessary, I'm ready to post here the list of the modules loaded on my machine as well as my hardware configuration. I would like to build with a help of all community members a kind of tutorial/guide for other users of older notebooks, who wish optimise the system's performance withh minimum troubles.

I will appreciate any reply and will be very happy if this post will be usefull for others.

Regards,
Andrey

This shouldn't affect the boot process at all. As you can see you are booting, without erros, and only warnings.

Well according to the error message you don't have any modules to exclude. Ok, actually you do have modules, but your kernel can't load them, so you might as well not have any. This isn't always a bad thing though. On my gentoo box I don't have any modules loaded. But thats not a big deal for me right now, because I'm compiling my own kernel first chance I get. Odds are SUSE has compiled the kernel with as many options as possiable to include all your hardware built in. That means you don't need any modules to boot.

What you can do is compile your own kernel. Get a list of all your hardware, compile a kernel with only that hardware needed. That will make slimmer and supposedly quicker. Just make sure and keep a working kernel in the boot menu just in case.

Hello.

I see your point conserning the modules, but the issue is that lsmod gives me quite a long list of loaded modules. My suspictions are that at boot time the kernel fails to load modules for 2.6 and "fails back" to modules of 2.4. I'm going to find it out soon...

Hmm, to be honest, kernel recompilation is the last thing I want to do. From the very beginning I was using standard kernels - of Suse and Debian - and would like to proceed so. That's why I initiated this thread - to find out, how one could optimise the system WITH standard kernel.

Regards,
Andrey.

Well if you don't want to recompile your kernel, hdparm is another way to help improve the speed of your computer.

Hello!

I will try to improve the settings of the harddrive too. But first I would like to clean memory...

Regards,
A.