I just put my fedora system out of it's misery and installed gentoo 64 bit. I ended up with a 2.5mb kernel that has all the drivers which are important to me (except nvidia which I load as a module) statically compiled in as a custom kernel built for my machine.

I had to do this because I have a crappy nvidia chipset and want to run 64 bit, but wow this system is fast as balls now.

I have an NF590/AMD64 chipset and kept getting kernel panics. I tried fedora, ubuntu and knoppix.Even when they were running they were pretty slow.

I hard removed the APIC and ACPI from the kernel and boot using irqpoll.

I thought it would make the system slow down to do this but I think I was wrong.I'm loading up Eve tomorrow and will keep this thread updated with the real deal on performance with this crappy chipset and these kernel modules removed.

Last but not least, why isn't there a Gentoo forum on here?

This distro kicks ass, even though it does take around 2 days to install with problem hardware being a Gentoo noob. I think I'm in love.

Learning lesson #1. If you install Gentoo, and use anything but an IDE drive, you have to statically compile the disk controller driver into the kernel to prevent a chicken before the egg situation XD

Honestly, at the speed GCC runs on this, I don't think I've ever seen linux go this fast. I also don't believe I'll be messing with nvidia chipsets after this. I had trouble with it using windows XP as well.

-Viz

It's not usually a good idea to compile everything into the kernel, this will cause problems. Instead, compile only what you have to as built-in and the rest as modules. You could compile everything in safely if you are very careful and know what you are doing.

My custom kernel is 1712 kB. Yours is bigger because you compiled everything in.

Oh, and there isn't a Gentoo forum 'here', because there is a bigger and better and official Gentoo forum here:
http://forums.gentoo.org/index.php

I got some cruft out of there. I did leave all the stuff _I_ use statically compiled in. Unfortunately I forgot to check the size when I was done.

I also found out there was an IDE option causing ATAPI to spam syslog with messages(around 9 lines per second), which was slowing me down LOL.

I took a few hours and went through every kernel option and actually read the information. I don't know if it's smaller tho. I'll check back later.

I did solve my ATAPI/IDE issue.

Things are a lot quieter in syslog XD.

Oh, and redhat, suse, and ubuntu have their own forums, and are on LQ, why not Gentoo? Gentoo's wiki is far superior to any of these, but still... it's inconsistent and seems anti-Gentoo to not have one here.

-Viz