[Nottingham] The quickest distro in NLUG

[Martin Garton]

On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 16:07 +0100, Roger Light wrote:
> On 14/09/06, Martin Garton <martin at stupids.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 11:09 +0100, Martin wrote:
> >
> > > Kustom Kompiled Kernels Is Kwick whatever distros...?
> >
> > In my experience, custom compiled kernels don't make much difference on
> > most hardware except in corner cases.  I believe this is partly down to
> > the way the kernel is coded. (more like using C as a portable assembler)
> 
> The advantage of custom compiled kernels is just that - you get to
> tweak the features to your needs as well as to see what is up and
> coming.

Yes I agree, but I was speaking from a purely performance perspective.  

Are there any features (apart from the debugging options) that make any
real performance difference?

I know that until recently running SMP on UP was slower due to
unneccesary locking, but I believe that's been changed and the
difference is now negligible.

Some folks say preempt makes a lot of difference, but I'm not convinced.
(lower latency != faster machine)

Compiling for the right architecture makes a difference, but pretty much
all x86 users are running i686 class machines now anyway. 

> > [1] with the possible exception of -O2 in some cases.
> 
> And possibly -Os if you have very small cpu cache.

Good point. In fact ISTR that fedora now ship with -Os by default
instead of -O2.

-- 
Martin.