Recent Fedora Core kernels (plus my SPEC file for 2.6.8-1.541 with Athlon support)
William M. Quarles
quarlewm at jmu.edu
Wed Dec 1 06:48:33 UTC 2004
Dave Jones wrote:
> 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
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