On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 11:36:23AM -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
> Dave Jones wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > C. If it doesn't hurt and it would probably help, I don't see what's > > the > matter with making an Athlon-optimized kernel.
> >
> >A number of reasons.
> >- It's one more column in the matrix of supported kernels to worry about.
> > This may seem insignificant, but it takes quite a while to push
> > a kernel package through the buildsystem given how many variants
> > it spits out. On a busy day (like for eg, just before release), it
> > can take the better part of a day to get packages built.
> >- The gain just isn't worth it over the 2.4 kernels.
> > Now that the runtime optimisations get performed in 2.6, theres only
> > one thing thats missing that would be in an Athlon optimised kernel,
> > and thats the optimised copy_page/clear_page, which are really only
> > a win when a lot of data is being copied back/forth between the kernel,
> > and even then, only under certain usage patterns. I'll be surprised
> > if this shows up on any real-world application.
> <snip>
> > Apparently the man who started this thread found his real-world > applications.
I don't see any numbers. There's also nothing specifically indicating that building for Athlon is why he saw a performance win. If something else also got disabled (even inadvertantly), that could also factor into it.
Good point. There's a lot of crap that can be thrown out of the kernel configuration if you're compiling it for a specific computer. Which reminds me, I should probably get around to that for my computer.
---- Peace, William
