Erik N Johnson wrote:
Building a kernel is not a herculean task by any measure. It is completely automated and the configuration can easily be done graphically if you have an X11 server. You probably need to go looking for some literature before you try to boot up a machine as expensive as a z10 on a homebrew kernel, but scads of PC Linux users build their own kernel with every new release. The benefit is perhaps to be questioned on big iron, bearing in mind that the folks like SuSE that provide those default builds also provide lots of the actual kernel code. Besides, the peripherals on a mainframe are much less numerous and klugey, eliminating another big reason to roll your own. It's not hard, just not that useful.
Hackers aside, it's rarely useful on little iron either. The reason most cited is "to improve performance" by which I expect they mean to save time sometime. They need to save a lot of time to recoup the time spent building and checking the kernel. As best I recall it took me around 90 minutes computer to build a fairly complete Fedora kernel on a Core 2 system; it would take quite a bit longer than that for me to configure a basic kernel that works. fwfw I was trying to resolve a problem and get _some_ performance with new kernels as opposed to _better_ performance. -- Cheers John -- spambait [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Advice http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 You cannot reply off-list:-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
