[Xmame] Which kernel for Xmame?

[Guillaume Rava]

Hi all, I have for project to make a dedicated Xmame machine from an old PC (333MHz) and a TV-out video card (and a small HD, no CD, no floppy, no Ethernet, just a serial port for maintenance). Even though I do not intend to run power-consuming games (only 80’s games), I want to optimize the machine for best performance. Some optimizations are no-brainer: for example, no need to install a firewall, and xinetd will only have a telnet daemon and an ftp server running (for maintenance through the serial port). Also, no need for KDE, Gnome and such, just X and twm should be enough.   But what do you think about the kernel? Using the latest kernel-du-jour doesn’t seem to be the obvious choice to me, as it has a bunch of features (and more features = more CPU load) useless to an isolated dedicated machine running only one app, Xmame…   Any advice?