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When Linus Torvalds recently claimed that the Linux kernel was “bloated”,
there were many who were not prepared to simply let that slide.

Of course there are two issues: size and speed. Size is totally up to you:
enable lots of features when building a kernel, you end up with a large one;
leave out features, you get a small one. Or put lots of features into
modules, so they only take up disk space, not RAM, until you actually use
them. Which is what’s normally done.

As for speed, there are lots of people keeping an eye on this. Many of their
results seem to be trade-secret confidential, but a few are public
<http://lwn.net/Articles/357795/>. There seems to be a lack of a systematic
effort to produce results that can be freely published and discussed with a
view to improving things.

But as is usual in the open-source world, if there’s an itch, someone will
scratch it.