I've played a bit with the building procedure for i386:
(1) Freeing of initialization code implemented in similar way to that
currently present on Sparc. Added dummy headers for other archs =>
adding of __initfunc to all generic code is now possible and welcome.
(2) Lots of useless code (mostly a.out building relicts) removed.
(3) Removed support for old binutils (encaps etc.) as those cannot be
used because of their bugs.
Other ideas to consider (comments welcome):
(a) Freeing of initialization code for modules... This probably won't
save enough to be worth the work.
(b) Disabling writes to kernel code and R/O data -- maybe this could
help catch a few bugs, but it's impossible to do with the Pentium
4MB pages.
Please test this patch, especialy if you have a SMP machine... It's available
on ftp://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/pub/local/mj/linux/patches/free.diff.
Good luck
Martin