[PlanetCCRMA] Re: Kernel compilation

[Mark Knecht]

On 10/7/05, Luis Garrido <garrido_luis@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Mark!
>
> Thanks for your answer. Yup, I know from other postings of yours that you
> have spent a lot of time tweaking and optimizing, so I appreciate you share
> your expertise.
>
> Talking about safety, what I am concerned about is that having a Fedora
> based system, not applying Fedora patches may break things up.

I don't *think* there's much likelihood in that. The kernel seems to
stand pretty much on it's own. As long as you have the right
chipset/hardware support, the right file system support, etc., then
you're probably OK.

>
> Other problem I see is the huge amount of time one has to invest in tweaking
> a kernel (identifying hardware, finding the right config values, etc.) when
> the gain might in the end be marginal, but your numbers sound good to me ;-)

Yeah,  it's a bunch of time when you start. Not so much later. That
said, after I learned to do it I often built my own kernels even on my
Planet boxes.

Also, after you start running Gentoo, where EVERYTHING is built from
source, the time to build a kernel seems very small by comparison. A
kernel takes 5 minutes. Firefox take 20. glibc takes 60. Gnome takes
100. Open Office take 1000. ;-) (I don't buld Open Office. I use the
binary.)

> OTOH, an AMD64 system has probably more room for improvement than an Intel
> one when compared to a generic i686 build like Nando's.

Yep. Very true.

Cheers,
Mark