delete old kernel

[James Wilkinson]

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.

-- 
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