@Gregory > What he rather need is to boot GENERIC, then record dmesg, and strip > the kernel down according to that dmesg.
That is exactly what I've done and this led me to my first posting here, because it generally worked fine, but only to a certain extend. It didn't work completely. Something is still missing. With the help of Andres Perara I got one step further, means, I found one more dependency. After I could not find the dependency of the dependency, he pointed me to this: > "The npx driver is required for proper system functioning regardless > of whether or not an NPX is present." > > so there's no 1:1 mapping between the devices you have and the ones > you may need included in the kernel config. could potentially apply to > other drivers So, unfortunately, it's not as easy as you and I thought. @Peter > Please compare the values > you used in the previous release (I'm guessing 4.9), vs what you are > attempting in this release. Unfortunately I have to admit that I was a bit lazy and did not update for quite a while. The latest kernel config files I stripped down were from 4.3. So nearly 4 years ago. And even then I was "just" stripping down as much as was obvious to me would not be needed for me. I continued removing parts of the config until my goal was reached to have a small enough kernel. Now the kernel is much bigger than in 4.3 so I need to get rid of more stuff than I had to before. So comparing the config files could maybe help a bit, but won't generally solve my problem. > Since users (and developers) pretty much /only/ use GENERIC, there > are many "options" which are not optional. We don't look for them, > and many of them are required for proper use. Yeah, I know and I don't think that this is a problem with OpenBSD. However, I'm in an unusual situation not comparable to the standard user or developer. I have a very special demand. I'm asking if anybody can tell me anything about how to find out which "optional" parameters aren't actually really "optional". > Essentially, you are one of the very very few that does this. I agree here. > The > only advice we can give is to do the top-down method of stripping > out options. I know you don't want to do it, but it is what it is. Nah, it's not that I don't want to do it. It's just that I was searching for a better way. It seems there is none. Which is OK with me. Just asking. @marc > If you really want that, tell us how much you're prepared to spend, maybe > someone would be willing to sell you time to solve that very specific problem > since obviously, no OpenBSD developer wants to do it for free, as it's > considered a waste of time that could otherwise benefit the project for > useful purposes... Well, I'd be ready to spend money for this, if that would mean a future change in the kernels config files in a way that mandatory options are marked as such. But that to happen is very unlikely. So it would only be a solution for 5.0 and it may happen that with 5.1 there is a new mandatoy driver which depends on another driver that's included in GENERIC but not in my configs and then I'd have to start all over. So thanks for the offer, but I'm not afraid of working my way through this. I was always just asking if there might be a more clever way which I just didn't know. Regards, T.
