vmware slackware guest not booting without huge kernel

With the abandonment of the huge kernel, my vmware guest running Slackware64-current (on a Windows host) is throwing a kernel panic, VFS unable to mount etc... If I roll back to 6.10.8 kernel package where the huge kernel was included, then everything works. I am suspecting some compile option used in the huge kernel is missing in the generic, but I am not able to figure out which option since there are so many. Any thoughts?