Joao Paulo Pires wrote: > I just use the official Fedora kernel. > Is there any advantage about building my own kernel? I have Toshiba > laptop, FC4 and Gnome. Curiosity. Desire to know how things work. To prove you can, There are other valid reasons (e.g. you want to enable something that isn't in the standard Fedora kernel), but you'd probably know about the reasons if they applied to you. There (used to be) a "benchmarkable difference" in speed between drivers that are compiled into the kernel and those that are loaded as modules, according to Andi Kleen (SuSE kernel guy). This was because the processor's TLB (which translates between virtual memory addresses and physical memory addresses) is more efficient when the kernel can be treated as one long binary. See http://lwn.net/Articles/13216/ for more details. As far as I can tell, his patch isn't in the current kernel. But I understand that bit of the kernel has been in some flux since he wrote that: the same functionality may be achieved a different way these days. Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james | It's fair enough for a surgeon to refuse to operate on @westexe.demon.co.uk | someone who won't stop smoking: you've got to give the | anaesthetist a chance to get in there. | -- "Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation", BBC Radio 4
