[Preston] Building Modular Kernels

[Guy Heatley]

To be honest, I have never noticed any real performance increase in
kernels that I have compiled myself compared to generic ones. The reason I
have compiled kernels in the past (and the only reason that seems worth
the hassle) is to get support for hardware that isn't supported via
'normal' means (but I suppose you could class this as a performance
increase). This has in the past been PCMCIA support for laptop network
cards, eliminating SCSI conflicts (ZIP drive / CD burner / USB drives) and
nVidia drivers.
I still generally roll my own but only because I know my hardware so well
(or should I say, I've had it for so long ;-) that I now know what makes
it run best.
Regards,
-- 
Guy

> Hi there,
>
> If you have plenty of memory (eg 128MB+), is there any point in having a
> modular kernel over just compiling everything straight in?  I know that
> modules allow memory to be saved when those parts of the kernel aren't
> needed, but isn't that just as in saving a bit of kernel code from being
> loaded, which is surely just a couple of megs at the most?  I'm planning
> on just switching back to compiling everything straight in for a while
> in the interests of making life easier, but just wondering if there's
> any major reason that we're supposed to use modules for that I've forgot.
>
> Kernel 2.6 has gone okay... have got alsa working, and a couple of other
> things, but noticed no performance increase (that's with pre-emptible
> kernel enabled) - but no loss either.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew
>
>
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