Has anyone experimented with the effects of building the kernel (and
libc, for that matter) with more agressive options? 1.2 builds with
simply "-O2". What about making it something like:

 -O6 -fomit-frame-pointer -m486

?? First, does this have a significant impact on system performance, and
second (the reason I haven't just tried it myself :-) does everything
still work properly?