why recompile for speed??
 

all....
i was reading a post in the 'installation' lists and it mentioned that they should recompile their kernel for more speed.. what did this mean?? not the recompile but what could you add to the kernel that will tweak it that much..

r
:study:

the kernel contains a lot of junk basically. When you release a shrink wrapped box with a system inside it, that system needs to work on as many machines as possible in order for it to be useful. consequently there are lots of things compiled into the kernel that are not needed, and when the kernel is bigger, it naturally uses more memory and is slower and can affect the performance of your system. For instance i have no scsi devices, so i ave no scsi drivers in my kernel. and lots of other things like that.

my own kernel isn't tiny, BUT:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1058833 Nov 9 00:35 vmlinuz-2.4.13-6mdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 778629 Dec 27 13:13 vmlinuz-2.4.17

you can see the difference in size is noticeable.

the main thing for recompiling a kernel is to add processor optimizations and get rid of junk - it's not really what you can add, it's what you can take out of the kernel that speeds it up. a smaller kernel is faster and more stable than a large kernel.

Most linux distributions come with a kernel compiled to be backward compatible with intel 486.
By doing so the newer processor instructions implemented in newer processors won't be used.

where can i find more info on this?? i guess to start where can i find a compiler..

You will probably already have a compiler installed, or if not your distro will have a way of installing it through whatever package system they use. Look for "gcc". While you're getting that, you might want to install the kernel source as well. The source for the version you are using will be available in your distro somehow, or if you feel like upgrading, go check out http://www.kernel.org.

I read some of the post and run Kernel Configurator in Mandrake Linux 8.1. It gave me a text file. What are the steps to compile a kernel. I read the Kernel How to's and I still don't understand it. Can someone summarize the steps or the command lines that I need to type.

what IS this kernel config program ppl keep talking about?? just read the relevant bits of the howto at linuxdoc.org for standard kernel info, the quick guide makes perfect sense i think

make xconfig
make dep
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install

Kernel Configurator is found in KDE. It is an X window software so it is a little slow.

Buildkernel program for us newbies:
http://users.dhp.com/~whisper/buildkernel/

I haven't got to the part on installing BuildKernel.