David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com> wrote:
> > Whether this is desirable or not is debatable. The big question is: why
> > on earth would Aunt Tillie _want_ to compile a kernel at all, let alone
> > re-configure one? If she's using Linux, she's installing her
> > distribution's pre-compiled kernel, and has no need for anything else.
> why is it that so many people seem to think that it's a good thing to only
> use precompiled kernels from the distro? a kernel tuned for a particular
> machine can boot faster and run faster then a 'stock' kernel.
I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying that the 5% performance increase
that results is not something that the average "I just want to use the system"
will even notice, let alone care about.
> unless you want to replace the kernel compile config options with a
> similar sized menu to select between precompiled kernels with the correct
> options (never mind what that will do to the size of the distros to ship
> so many kernels)
They don't need to ship a mass of kernels. Modern distributions probably
don't need to worry about shipping three or four modular kernels. Any user
who cares about the minor performance benefits of a custom-configured kernel
is going to reconfigure and recompile regardless of how dumbed-down the
interface is.
Charles
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org> GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/ Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 23 2001 - 21:00:28 EST