[Nottingham] The quickest distro in NLUG

[Martin]

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
[---]
> 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)

What is the status for the "MM" ('multimedia') versions of the kernel
that are supposedly super-responsive? Have they been debugged out of
their 'experimental' status?


> 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.

Any point in compiling with "-march" ?

In any case, what compute intensive bits are there in the kernel?


Mmmm, my guess is that -Os should be the most useful.

For my case for a certain old machine, a custom kernel would be most
useful just to be able to fit the image onto a floppy and so avoid
having to use isolinux for bootup. (Shame I couldn't get Gentoo to play
with that hardware.)


Which comes to the next question for all our super-fast new machines:

Why aren't the apps super fast also?
Why does it take a full second or more to start up a new app?!

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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