Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I’m a working man, doc…) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel) vmlinuz
right now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that’s a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It’s not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they’re roughly on the same order of magnitude?
Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.
Ah, that explains a lot! Didn’t know about TCL.