[Nottingham] The quickest distro in NLUG

[Dean Sas]

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Martin Garton wrote:
> 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. 
> 
With recent kernels this shouldn't really make much difference
apparently as it can detect optimisations at runtime, Ubuntu have pretty
much scrapped CPU specific kernels [0] only having a 386 kernel (which
is kept for some chipset compatibility) and a generic kernel for other
CPUs (including SMP).

Dean

[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-August/019983.html
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