On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:35:32 -0700 (PDT)
David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: akpm@linux-foundation.org
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:39:04 -0700

quoted

From: Thomas Petazzoni <redacted>

Add the CONFIG_ETHTOOL option which allows to remove support for ethtool,
not necessarly used on embedded systems.  As this is a size-reduction
option, it depends on CONFIG_EMBEDDED.  It allows to save ~6 kilobytes of
kernel code:

   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
1258447	 123592	 212992	1595031	 185697	vmlinux
1252147	 123592	 212992	1588731	 183dfb	vmlinux.new
  -6300       0       0   -6300   -189C +/-

Question: should we also remove ethtool-related functions from all network
drivers ?

This patch has been originally written by Matt Mackall
[off-list ref], and is part of the Linux Tiny project.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni <redacted>
Cc: Matt Mackall <redacted>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Jeff Garzik <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

There is no way I'm applying this, ever.

This change means you can't configure nearly all of the features on
your ethernet card.  You can't even configure the link parameters
without ethtool support.

This has been in linux-tiny for a long time - at least since 2.6.5.

So either a) nobody sets CONFIG_ETHTOOL=n or b) you're wrong.

I don't know which of these is the case and I don't know how to find
out.

I could be that the feature was useful back in the 2.6.5 days but
is now completely useless, dunno.

If you want 6K back get rid of the random number generator, I hear
embedded people don't need that either :-)

They'll take all they can get.