is ti possible to recompile kernel like linux ?

[andrewweb]

That's not the case from my experience. It's entirely possible to strip out so much of the kernel that you need to do a recompile to get additional hardware support.

Indeed, I was going to switch to linux completely, but was scared away when I found I would HAVE to recompile the kernel just to support certain hardware I have.

[cppm]

That's not the case from my experience. It's entirely possible to strip out so much of the kernel that you need to do a recompile to get additional hardware support.

Also IIRC some drivers are designed such that they have to be compiled in. A given distro may need to make tradeoffs in what drivers they include, so as to avoid ones which cause problems...

On the flip side could including the drivers within the kernel improve the security situation?

[andrewweb]

That's not the case from my experience. It's entirely possible to strip out so much of the kernel that you need to do a recompile to get additional hardware support.

Also IIRC some drivers are designed such that they have to be compiled in. A given distro may need to make tradeoffs in what drivers they include, so as to avoid ones which cause problems...

On the flip side could including the drivers within the kernel improve the security situation?

Perhaps. But it causes a lot of bloat.

[Z98]

That's not the case from my experience. It's entirely possible to strip out so much of the kernel that you need to do a recompile to get additional hardware support.

Also IIRC some drivers are designed such that they have to be compiled in. A given distro may need to make tradeoffs in what drivers they include, so as to avoid ones which cause problems...

On the flip side could including the drivers within the kernel improve the security situation?

Other way around. Drivers are very often the cause of bugs and instability because they're poorly written. Moving them outside the kernel into usermode or some such helps increase stability at the cost of performance.

[andrewweb]

That's not the case from my experience. It's entirely possible to strip out so much of the kernel that you need to do a recompile to get additional hardware support.

Also IIRC some drivers are designed such that they have to be compiled in. A given distro may need to make tradeoffs in what drivers they include, so as to avoid ones which cause problems...

On the flip side could including the drivers within the kernel improve the security situation?

Other way around. Drivers are very often the cause of bugs and instability because they're poorly written. Moving them outside the kernel into usermode or some such helps increase stability at the cost of performance.

Yep, in recent NT OSes, MS have tried to move a lot of drivers into usermode.
The big exception is Win32k, which is kernel mode simply to improve performance.