[PlanetCCRMA] Re: Kernel compilation

[Mark Knecht]

On 10/7/05, Luis Garrido <garrido_luis@hotmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
> From a recent post of Mark Knecht about kernel compilation (thanks!)  it
> seems that he is using a vanilla stock kernel plus Ingo's patches. Is that
> right, Mark?

Almost. It's really a vanilla kernel (2.6.13) plus bleeding edge
updates to the proposed next vanilla kernel (2.6.14-rc3) + Ingo's
patches. (currently -rt11)

>Is there some potential pitfall in not using a Fedora specific
> patched kernel?

My AMD64 machine is not Fedora based so that would not be appropriate for me.

> If you don't need dripping bleeding edge features, wouldn't
> it be safer to rebuild from the SRPMS at
>
> http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/all/linux/SRPMS/
>
> as Nando explains in this posting
>
> http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/pipermail/planetccrma/2005-September/010273.html

That's a fine thing to do. It all really depends, IMO, on how those
kernels work for you. Fernando is cool about providing the source RPMs
for the kernels he builds. this is great because people can leverage
what he's done, make small modifications, and still run a kernel with
the same patches he's provided. That's great.

It probably comes down to how well the patches work. In my mind I've
never understood exactly what patches Redhat or Fedora have applied to
the vanilla kernel. Most of the time this doesn't matter, but for
instance Fedora removed the ability to make kernel stack sizes that
were no 4K. This made it impossible to run some wireless adapters
under ndiswrapper. If you need wireless then (at that time) the Fedora
kernels weren't a good option.

As for safety, is a kernel 'safer' when it's closer to vanilla or when
it's closer to Fedora? I don't pretend to know!

This all gets down to how much you want to customize things I think,
and how much you're willing to get your hands dirty. It also depends a
lot on how standard your hardware is. My AMD64 uses a new NForce4
chipset and hence I needed a new kernel to make it work well. Mykernel
is smaller since I support only my hardware. Fernando has to build and
supply support for all chipsets, all NICs, etc., so his foot print is
larger and more general in nature. Which do you prefer?

I'm now running Jack at 64/2, playing music, browsing the web, and
building a kernel. (-rt11 without SMP support.) No xruns this morning.
Very few yesterday. With a standard kernel I couldn't run safely at
512/2. You decide... ;-)

- Mark