Building in random drivers hurts the majority

In karmic there are 33 pata and 12 sata drivers built-in to the kernel. This may seem like a good idea, but in fact it causes more problems than it solves.

First off, including a driver that is only used by 0.1% of users will in fact hurt the other 99.9%. The extra amount of code loaded into memory will use up pages, and make it more likely to have a cache miss, and become detrimental to performance over-all.

The only real gain of making a hardware driver built-in, is to benefit the majority of users. Things that can fall into this category are ahci driver, which is in-use on almost all chipsets (this includes nvidia and intel).

In my case, the pata-acpi driver is built-in and it is getting bound to my promise pata before the promise driver can. I have to rebuild the kernel because I cannot disable pata-acpi.

Please, go back and remove all of these and review each inclusion based on the amount of users it benefits.