'Fine Tune' 2.6 kernel
 

I'm trying to get my kernel as pink and pretty as possible, but there's still alot of things I don't know about the Linux kernel and GNU/Linux in general, so I'm sure I don't see alot of things.

I was wondering if I posted my machine and kernel configuration, someone might be able to help me research and suggest any changes I ought to make, and hopefully describe why so I'll know in the future.

There is a free, online book aimed at giving the "normal" user informnation on the kernel - go to http://www.kroah.com/lkn/ to download it.

You can also have a look at this website:
http://kernelnewbies.org/

What can you "Fine-tune"?
-> Remove all uneeded drivers: be sure to not remove the ones for your harddisk or IDE or SATA! For this you need a lot of details on what device specifications you have (lspci will tell you)
-> Be sure that your processor is the good one so that optimization are the best ones.
-> Change in the scheduler (type, HZ, ..) , memory management.
-> Network parameters (do you want ATM, ppp, RNIS, ...)
-> .. a lot in fact :)

I'm not sure you will see a big difference compared to a full kernel. The parts that you don't use are not loaded (modules).

I'll check those out, and I've pretty much tried to follow all those. I've had to jump through some hoops to get SATA working with 2.6.19.1, because it's not remarkably clear what I need to have for it, because the 2.6 that comes with Slackware actually puts libata under the SCSI stuff, so apparently it was moved later, but I enabled SCSI and all sorts of other stuff and... I don't know how, and it took me a long time to get it working so I'm not too sure I care why, but it works.

I want to cull out anything that I will never use and make modules for things I might use, but the big problem I'm having... while I'm understanding things more and more, there's just some things I don't understand. I'll look through those guides first and come back to this if I need any more help. Thank you.

Typical problem that a lot of people have faced... Took me several days last time to get my dma working. I still haven't completly understood how I managed :)
Others problems might be: wireless and for what's out of the kernel: sound, graphic cards.

yea like someone else pointed out Linux is load on demand so even though we understand why you are messing with it. geneally making the kernel smaller by not including stuff doesn't actually make it run better. It IS better for security i think. but for performance you can stick with the stock module setup and tweek processor specific stuff. schedular, tick setup and like that.
it even helps alot to do some testing and alter the cflags in the kernel makefile to have more optimized code. then you just need to do runntime tweeking through the /proc filesystem.