On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 01:38:42PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > This is exactly our disagreement. My position is that it is well within > our capabilities to make this unnecessary. And you disagree with that > which is fine with me.
It was recently calculated that there are over 2000 kernel options in the 2.4-ac series. If you wanted to build a kernel with every possible configuration of those options, well, it would be hard. This is about choice. I want to compile my sound card's driver into the kernel. I want to compile bttv, however, as a module. I also want IDE as a module, but I want support for my particular scsi card (and only that scsi card) built-in. I also want a custom set of IP options, Athlon optimizations, and to be running the -ac branch. I should build my own kernel, right? And why is that kind of custom configuration different from saying "I want my kernel to be optimized for XXX processor", of which there are dozens of types? It's so much more unlikely that anyone would notice the performance differences of your kernels than one would notice feature differences in a suite of targeted kernels ("kernel for a router", "kernel for a workstation", "kernel for a server"...). I don't support distribution of more than one or two standard kernel binaries, for the purpose of installations, but I'm merely trying to show that CPU optimizations are the least of what important kernel options and CPU optimizations exist. And that everyone should build their own kernel to get the quality and performance they would expect from Debian.