back in the day, this was why i went gentoo in the first place. i
needed a better scheduler and compiling a new kernel off red hat for
instance almost always broke other stuff.
gentoo made my life easier.
On 12 28, 08, at 7:32 AM, kashani wrote:
I'll second what Hung said, getting your kernel right takes a bit of
time.
However I'll add a few points. Back in the day I used to build
super stripped down kernels, but eventually realized it was kinda
ridiculous. Why spend almost thirty hours for almost no real world
gain other than driving yourself insane? It was almost worth my time
on a Sparc5 with 64MB, but today you're better off spending your
time cooking dinner and spending the $20 you saved vs the restaurant
on RAM. Well maybe you'd need to do that twice. :-)
On the other hand I learned a fair amount about what not to screw
with by ripping everything out. If you want to go that route, it'll
take you around a week to make almost all the mistakes. Realize this
will happen and then enjoy the process. I also recommend taking
notes or you'll keep repeating your mistakes.
LOL yeah. this happened to me.
The other thing is don't get carried away in stripping things out
of your kernel. Need to mount and ISO, oops you removed loopback
support. Need to make your machine into a DHCP server, oops your
removed (gah I should remember this) sockets (i think). Need to use
OpenVPN, oops you removed tap/tun interfaces. The list goes on and
on. Yeah you can install those as modules once you figure out that
they are missing which can be frustrating when the errors aren't
very clear.
*nods* i do this too. i strip everything off--- hardware that i don't
need but i do keep a lot of things turned on like FS stuff. if the box
isn't a server, i turn on the networking stuff like tap/tun interfaces
as modules. if the box is a server then it gets turned on.
i also make sure that i turn a lot of FS on. even reiserfs. especially
ntfs. etc. etc. you never know if you'll need those in the future.
My advice is take the middle path. Cut the complete crap out like
parallel ports, ISDN, and SCSI cards that aren't actually in your
system. Leave most of the rest alone for the most part unless you're
pretty sure you know what it is. As you get a bit more comfortable
and have a history of working kernels you can experiment more.
kashani
but yeah, really took a lot of time and learning and messing around.
have fun!
Cocoy
www.twitter.com/cocoy
"People who are really serious about software should make their own
hardware" -- Alan Kay
