Can recompiling your kernel lead to speed improvements

[David Bandel]

On 12/6/06, James McDonald <james at jamesmcdonald.id.au> wrote:
> I have an AMD Athlon(tm) Processor CPU and am running Ubuntu  2.6.17-10-386.
>
> Can I expect performance gains if I recompile the kernel specifically
> for the AMD processor... I just read a Ubuntu thread that had a bunch of
> people that say it makes *no* difference.
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24853
>
> My thinking is if you are compiling on you own machine and have the
> correct optimization shouldn't that give slight improvement?

see Kurt's reply.  Smaller kernels are faster, but often the
difference while measurable, is not noticeable to the average user.
OTOH, big, heavy, CPU intensive apps will definitely be affected.
POVRAY drawing something big will be noticeable (which is why it's
used as a measure of speed on supercomputers).  But how many folks use
POVRAY?

>
> And while I'm at it
> <rant>
> I'm gaining frustration with some of the more adminish tasks I could do
> with ease under FC* and am now finding difficult under Ubuntu...
>
> Setting global environment vars? edit /etc/environment ... Hmm well i
> can't get a simple ~/bin into the path using that method...

Well, you could.  All these things are distro-specific.  When a user
logs in, several files are sourced depending on any number of
variables including whether or not it's an X session (in which case
it's not a login shell, so shell level > 0) or which shell is called
(bash, csh, etc.).

If you could get a path set (or expanded) in /etc/environment, it's
because a shell rc file sourced /etc/environment.  You just have to
ensure you do the same by adjusting current users rc files to source
/etc/environment, then making the same change in the same rc file in
/etc/skel for future users.

It's all about understanding how things work.  Any distro can be
tailored to your liking, some just require more tweaking than others.
But if one does what you want out of the box, then use it.


>
> Getting my ADSL connection to automatically bring itself back up... Hmm
> well pppoeconf doesn't seem to have the option...

See my comments above.  This is just another specific case of having
to tailor something to the way you're used to working.  If a distro
does this out of the box for you, then great, use it.

>
> But with Ubuntu there is always a legion of users who will tell you that
> you just click on this , that the other and then... Well guess what, I
> want it to run headless and not be effected by a user logoff ...
>
> I am so tempted to begin the task of moving absolutely everything off
> this box so I can blow it away and put a mature distribution on it...

No distro will give you everything exactly how you want it unless it
is the one you learned on and so is the only way you expect things to
be.  Personally, of the hundreds of distros out there, none behaves as
I expect it to (my first UNIX OSs were SUNOS 1 and Ultrix).  RH
"protects" admins by aliasing rm and mv to run with the -i (which
annoys the devil out of me), etc., etc., distro by distro, including
all the ones I run daily.  Use what you like, modify what you don't
like.  And don't expect any distro to be exactly what you want out of
the box unless you build one yourself.

> </rant>

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
            - Nemesis Air Racing Team motto