I'm wondering if I should try building a kernel that only supports hardware present in my dell vostro 1310 laptop. I'm talking about a monolithic kernel with no loadable modules and all hardware support compiled statically(including wireless and nvidia drivers). Has anyone tried to do this before? If so, what improvements did you notice?

Yeah, I tried it, went to hell and back.

First, you should know which support you should compile in. Use lsmod to discover what modules are loaded and use make menuconfig to flag all those options and modules you want to compile in.

Too bad that the module names are different as kernel options, and then there are a few dozen of options for which you won't have the foggiest idea what they do, but some of them are needed.

Been there, done that. My custom kernel would not load noticably faster, and I never got my laptop completely to work. I wnet back to a normal Debian kernel some months ago. Nothing was slower, not using more memory, a waste of time to try that custom kernel.

jlinkels

Doing that (almost -- not quite there yet) along with some boot script adjustments for Slackware 13.1 on a Samsung N150 reduced the boot time from when LILO starts to load the kernel to when the graphical logon screen appears from 1 m 18 s to 46 s.