what's the largest bootable kernel?

[error27]

On kernel traffic they were talking about what would happen if you just turned every possible option on and compiled your kernel like that.

Aparently the kernel would be far to big to boot.

But I wonder where I could find information about what the bigest kernel you can boot on intel would be.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Craig McPherson]

I don't really think the kernelcould be made so big as to not be nbootable, assuming it's a bzImage. Although the boot loader itself resides in the MBR (bad) or boot sector (good), the boot loader is merely-hard wired with the location of the spot on the disk where the kernel begings. RAM permitting, I don't think the kernel would fail to boot sheerly due to size. There are probably a lot of other things that'd cause it to not boot, though.

Turning on everything that could be turned on safely, I'd estimate 40MB in size and 50 minutes to boot pon a Pentium 2.