Building custom kernel with gentoo... have some questions about a few settings
 

I am building a custom 64bit kernel with this hardware:

AMD Athlon II 245 (regor core, K10)
Asus M2NE AM2 motherboard
4 x 512mb DDR2 667 wintec memory (in ganged mode)
EVGA 8800gt (g92 core, 65nm)

This computer is hooked up to two monitor and a four way KVM switch (which has a monitor and 2 USB devices on it). I plan on using this computer for C programming, general linux experimentation, web browsing, and multimedia. I want to network it with both a linux and OSX machine, and I want to provide support for Wake on LAN features. Sleep modes need to work flawlessly, as well as dual monitor displays. If there are any features that are 100% essential to any of these tasks, please let me know so that I can make sure I have them enabled :). I would really appreciate it.

I have gone through and disabled a heck of a lot of stuff, taking some effort to read the help files and do some research, as well as use common sense.

I have some questions though:

EFI: This only pertains to macintosh hardware, correct? There are several EFI settings in device drivers and processor settings that I think I can disable, but am not sure.

Sound cards: I am using an ADI AD1988 integrated sound card on this computer. The options for how sound cards are enabled is odd though. I am thinking it is ok to disable "support old ALSA API", USB, PLMCIA, and PCI sound device menus? Is this chipset supported by the linux kernel, I am not sure? Help on that would be great.

Networking: There were a lot of drivers for networking devices I know I don't have. I enabled only the one for Nforce ethernet on Nvidia/AMD chipsets. Is this correct?

What does it mean exactly to have a kernel based virtual machine? I plan on using this computer for coding (in C) and basic file sharing/remote desktop purposes. What one of these virtual machines be useful? How are they different from others?

There where several options for voltage and current regulator support. I am an avid overclocker and underclocker, would enabling any of these allow me to adjust the core voltages on my CPU within linux?

There was an option for multimedia support that was disabled by default. How does this effect multimedia in general? Would I need to enable this to support playing popular file types and media devices?

I have a PCI Express GPU but the kernel has options for AGP graphics. Is it safe to disable all of these?

There were options for backlight & LCD device support as well as display panel/monitor support. What exactly do these drivers do? Will I need them to support dual monitor or standard LCD correctly? The description under help mentioned a lot about PDA's and mobile devices, I assume I don't need them?

I know this is a lot of questions to jam pack in one thread. Help with any of them would be much appreciated :)

If you are not installing Linux on a Mac, you can leave it in or leave it out.

I suggest set sound as modules and if you are not sure what module your sound card uses, select all of them. Be careful selecting experimental modules.

Like the sound card, select all the modules if you do not know.

A virtual machine is what it means. It creates a machine that virtually runs in your computer and it runs just like a computer. You should not enable it because there is a conflict when enabling certain options with nVidia graphics.

This is not supported and over clocking will make Linux become unreliable and unstable. Linux does utilizes hardware better than Windows, so there is no need to over clock.

I am not sure what mean by this. If you mean codec support, then make sure you enable a USE flag for a desire codec support during installing Mplayer, VLC, xine-lib, ffmpeg, and transcode.

Nope. You still have to enable graphic cards even though they are for AGP. Just make sure you select support for PCI Express. I suggest stay away from any modules that are for framebuffers or else you will have conflicts.

These modules are for notebooks only. In order to blank a LCD screen is with DPMS and APM BIOS calls.


To make all the kernel options easier and create an initrd in one command, use genkernel with the "--oldconfig" option. This will use what you are running now as a example. Of course it is a good thing to double check the kernel options by adding "--menuconfig" to genkernel. The disadvantage of using genkernel to help you in the process of compiling and creating an initrd file is it adds modules that you do not need.

Linux does not have a lot of options to configure for power management. Also desktops are still horrible for power management. If you are not using the computer, run folding@home or seti@home. If you prefer a noiseless environment, that will be a problem. You can use cpufreqd, laptop-tools, and apcid to help with power management. Suspend to RAM or suspend to disk does not always work.

Just to note if you are going to install GUI, make sure consolekit, consolefont, hald, and dbus are enabled or else X11 will have problems. Also make sure you state vga=ask for the kernel line in your boot loader or else you will not be able to switch from console to GUI.

Thanks a lot electro, this is all the intormation I need. So from this I gather I should:

disable EFI settings
Modularize anything that sounds close to my sound card
I know for sure I have an nforce chipset, and I am pretty sure it uses forcedeth, so it should be fine just enabling these if I feel confident?
I am going to keep the voltage current items disabled
not going to enable kernel level vm
I need AGP support
The LCD stuff is safe to disable

Perfect, thanks a lot for this. I have had this computer in use with slackware and everything I wanted worked pretty well with this distro, so I have high hopes for this one. Thanks a lot for your help.

EDIT: I researched my sound card and found that it is made by the company ALSA. I have the ALSA PCI drive set to module and the HD Audio->ALSA codec suppor and NVIDIA HDMI codec support drivers set to enabled. The others, for creative, intel, ATI, ect I set to disabled. Good?