Enabling everything?

[Dapper Dan]

I have a test box I like to try out new and old hardware on. Often, I'll run into something that won't work because support for it was not compiled into the kernel.

Other than slowing down my test box, what would happen if I compiled a kernel and enabled support for everything listed?

Anything wrong with doing this?

[josolanes]

I have a test box I like to try out new and old hardware on. Often, I'll run into something that won't work because support for it was not compiled into the kernel.

Other than slowing down my test box, what would happen if I compiled a kernel and enabled support for everything listed?

Anything wrong with doing this?

i'm not sure if there's anything wrong with it (problem-wise), but the kernel would be much larger than needed and would make the boot time a lot longer (since it would then search all of the hardware for the, relatively speaking, few things you might have on this computer).

as far as i know, that's the only real problem you might have...i don't think other problems would arise.

[Dolda2000]

There may very well be unforeseen problems, such as some drivers probing for hardware where other hardware may be (this is a common problem on ISA computers, if your box is that old), or certain options conflicting with others, and so on. Also, you should enable all kernel options just to get all drivers: Just enable all drivers for that.

I'd recommend compiling all the drivers as modules instead. That way, your kernel won't be larger than it should, it won't take longer to boot that it should, and you won't get either hardware or software conflicts.