Maybe its been brought up before - extremly likely.

But why arent distro that have the man/woman-power shipping kernels that are specifically geared towards the desktop (low latency) & maybe a kernel for servers (high throughoutput) .

And maybe another general kernel which is highly secure - I see efforts like grsecurity and similiar & have the feeling nobody is taking them seriously just like nobody seems to care very much about the miracle that is WINE.


Why arent the low latency ,security etc projects & patches used ?

There is.

Gentoo's got hardened sources for servers, desktop targeted sources, xen-enabled sources, and a few other kernels with other patch kits.

Thanx for the reply but Gentoo in this case still seems like the only distro that offers this ...

Still ... another reason to give Gentoo a try.

Once running Gentoo sounds like a fantastique distro

Any more opinion ?


Off-topic : How do the predone binaries compare to having a fully compiled from ground up system in speed difference ?

THey aren't that much different honestly.

Have a look at Kororaa - it's i686 binary Gentoo. You'll need at least SSE support (PIII or later).
Otherwise it Gentoo. Ahhh - it's still beta, but seems to be o.k.

I'm downloading it now for this (work) laptop - will replace the small Gentoo and Slack builds I have currrently.

Thanx again ... arent there any non-gentoo based distros out there which give similiar kernel choice ?

if night and day are not much different.
the trick is in doing it well.
check it out
with gcc -O2 my system
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 3900355.7 lps (10 secs, 6 samples)
with gcc -march=pentium4 -O3 -funroll-loops -ftracer -momit-leaf-frame-pointer -fprefetch-loop-arrays
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 4453259.6 lps (10 secs, 6 samples)
// about 14% increase over -O2

multiply that times say at least two layers of software like the kernel and you app and its underlying libs and you got a 25% ovrall performance increase

thats = to like what
2 grand for a new box ?

one thing to point out here is that these different kernel patches don't make much difference.
you mention low latency patches but they were only usefull in 2.4 kernel series before kernel addopted preemtion and stuff.
The kernel is changing all the time but i've built some pretty crazy kernels before as well as used ones patched all to crap that come with lots of different multimedia distributions.
sometimes they have tons of patches and run worse than vanilla ones i build myself.

sometimes the patches make the vanilla kernel worse at the very thing they are suposed to help.

it often depends on other options you use and whatnot. it's certainly not a cut and dry issue .
mostly if they are not a total waste of time they are adopted into the main kernel eventually.