Basic question but I was just wondering what are the benefits of rolling your own kernel as opposed to one that is ready made?

Is it faster, less likely to break, or what?

many thanks

You can make it far more lightweight than a distro kernel - kernels that come with your distro tend to support all sorts of hardware and eventualities. Rolling your own means you only have to include the options that you need, such as your model of video card, the file systems that you use, your sound card, etc etc instead of everything being in there to cover as many PCs as possible.

personally i found that running make menuconfig i can un-select items that i do not require and select items i do require & prefer, i hate initrd so i build ext3 support right in to the kernel so i no longer need initrd to load it as a module at the first part of the boot process...

most importantly the ability of customizing your kernel you can trim the unneeded items out and this makes for a leaner cleaner kernel...

when & if you do build your own kernel be very careful and pay close attention to detail and you can have good results...