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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