Hi, Quintin Holmberg writes:
[...] > i mean, we trust mandrake ... right? i personally would not presume to > believe i could build a better, more efficient or secure kernel than > they can. this is their job ... they are banking their entire > livelyhood on this. if they screw me, there are plent of other distro's > willing to pick up my support and i believe they know it. additionally, > mandrake takes linux and creates a distro that functions in a certain > way based around linux ... which is basically the kernel and it's > modules. It's not a matter of trust, but of trade-offs. Mandrake's (and other distros) first priority must be functionality over performance. That is, it's more important for the distro to work out-of-the box on as wide a selection of hardware as possible then for it to be fine-tuned for your particular machine. Of course, modules help (a lot!) provide wide hardware support without bloating the kernel, but not everything can be modular-ized. For example, compiling the kernel for your specific CPU might be worth a few % increased performance. Bottom line - it will always be possible to make a smaller/faster kernel than that which is provided with the distro. Whether it is worth the risk/effort or not is another question, though...
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