12 Aug
2004
12 Aug
'04
7:50 p.m.
Lee Revell wrote:
On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 18:46, Erik Steffl wrote:
My main point was that removing things you don't need from the kernel
will not speed up your system. You don't need to remove anything to
customizing the kernel to your hardware, unless you just want it to
build faster and save a negligible amount of memory. All that needs to
be done to customize a kernel to a given hardware configuration is to
add the features that are missing from the stock kernel. This has the
added benefit that most people can install the .deb
and it will work.
who's talking about removing? there's plenty of stuff to customize,
picking the right drivers is part of it but e.g. you might want ext3
support not as module since you want to boot off of the ext3 disk, add
support for chipset xxx (which is not default because it can cause
problems if the chipset is not present) so that your machine does not
freeze, you pick either acpi or apm or neither, you want the SATA disk
to appear as SCSI disk (because when it appears as IDE disk your
computer freezes) etc.
not saying everybody should do it but if you know what HW you have
(i.e. willing to read lables, output of lspci etc.) it's fairly easy to
do, in some cases it might be a significant performance difference (e.g.
if you are able to tweak it so that you can do DMA for HDs which
might not be possible with distro built kernel)
erik
So, I am
speaking more from my sysadmin background. Most Linux audio
users are more interested in intensively tweaking one box rather than
having to keep 100 of them just working. The requirements are very
different.
A good compromise is compiling your own kernel from your vendor's
sources. Once you get it working, please post .rpms or .debs somewhere
for others to use, especially if you applied some patch to get a feature
that's not in the stock kernel. This is an excellent way for non-coders
to contribute a lot to the open source process.
did you read my email? if you get debian source it creates configured
package for you. there's no point in making it available because the
whole point is to customize the kernel to your HW (which anybody can do,
just as easily)