Re: CML2 design philosophy heads-up

Charles Cazabon
2001-05-18T15:47:23Z

David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com> wrote:

> > Whether this is desirable or not is debatable. The big question is: why
> > on earth would Aunt Tillie _want_ to compile a kernel at all, let alone
> > re-configure one? If she's using Linux, she's installing her
> > distribution's pre-compiled kernel, and has no need for anything else.

> why is it that so many people seem to think that it's a good thing to only
> use precompiled kernels from the distro? a kernel tuned for a particular
> machine can boot faster and run faster then a 'stock' kernel.

I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying that the 5% performance increase
that results is not something that the average "I just want to use the system"
will even notice, let alone care about.

> unless you want to replace the kernel compile config options with a
> similar sized menu to select between precompiled kernels with the correct
> options (never mind what that will do to the size of the distros to ship
> so many kernels)

They don't need to ship a mass of kernels. Modern distributions probably
don't need to worry about shipping three or four modular kernels. Any user
who cares about the minor performance benefits of a custom-configured kernel
is going to reconfigure and recompile regardless of how dumbed-down the
interface is.

Charles
--
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Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
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