Custom Kernels
Wayne Leutwyler
wleutwyl at columbus.rr.com
Wed Oct 6 15:10:35 UTC 2004
On Wednesday 06 October 2004 10:59 am, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 10:36, Wayne Leutwyler wrote:
> > Quick question.
> >
> > Would I see any performance benefits from building my own custom kernel?
> > One of the things I see is that the stock kernel is set for a Pentium II,
> > but since this machine I am using is a Pentium III, I was wondering if
> > that would give me any benefit. Also I try on turn off things I know I
> > wont need on this PC.
>
> Any kind of performance tuning should start with analyzing what you are
> using the machine for and spending the time to identify where most of
> your resources are being spent.
>
> Simply jumping in and frobbing the knobs is generally not good
> practice. In most cases it will adversely affect your systems
> performance instead of improving it.
>
> And the kernel is probably the last item to work when optimizing a
> system. Again it really depends on what it is you are trying to improve
> performance of. For a heavy duty database server you will probably get
> more benefit by tweaking the queries or setting up proper keys. For a
> network application you may want to adjust window size or some of the
> other network parameters. If a particular application is slow doing
> certain calculations it may need to be re-written using a different
> algorithm. If you are reading and writing huge files you might need to
> use a different type of file system that optimizes that kind of function
> or use higher speed disk drives.
>
> So until you really analyze what specific performance criteria you are
> trying to improve messing with the kernel is a blind alley at best and
> at worst you could decrease performance of most things on your system.
>
> --
> Scot L. Harris
> webid at cfl.rr.com
>
> The absence of labels [in ECL] is probably a good thing.
> -- T. Cheatham
Thanks Scot these are all good points. There is no real machine I am doing
this on, its more of something I was wondering.
Maybe I did not ask my question correctly.
Are there any benefits from building a custom kernel, aside from a smaller
kernel and smaller modules foot print.
--
Wayne Leutwyler, RHCT
Sys Admin / DBA
Columbus, OH. USA
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list