> I thought this would build exactly the kernel that was shipped. > Instead I got a product three times as large. The kernel to be booted is not the vmlinux one, but rather arch/i386/boot/bzImage. You must "make bzImage" instead of just "make". This is explained in the README file of the kernel source tree. Please note that while you should in theory get the same kernel after "make oldconfig bzImage", it depends on whether who packed the distribution did his homework right. You should get the same output, but it's too easy to forget updating a .config to state that it's guaranteed to work (especially with niche distributions). /alessandro