Why try and re-invent the wheel? [Solved]

[yldouright]

I know there must be some on this forum who have successfully built custom kernels or compile scripts for standardized hardware from Dell, HP and Lenovo. I think it might be a good idea to collect all these in this thread for people to try them out and evaluate them against each other. As an example, here are some common laptops that have been around a while:

Dell E6500, E6510, E6520, M4400, M4500, M4600
HP Elitebook 8530W, 8540W, 8560W
Lenovo W500, W510, W520

Has anyone here done custom compiles for any of the above?

[khayyam]

[Ant P.]

The Linux kernel already has `make localmodconfig`

[yldouright]

Thanks for the input. I'm a complete Gentoo noob so please forgive my possibly silly questions. Am I to understand that the 'make localconfig' command will optimize the kernel automatically without having to define the hardware and tick any flags?

[khayyam]

[yldouright]

khayyam
The link was helpful. Is there any reason why why these localmodconfig files couldn't be linked in this thread? I would be happy just to have config files for the hardware in the opening post. The demands on bandwidth is not likely to overshadow the benefit to this website.

[Roman_Gruber]

Well we have the genkernel package for the lazy guys and kernel seeds.

As things evolve there is no thing as static config anymore.

I hardly found anyone in the past on this forum with my hardware, although i buy prebuild notebooks always.

There are hardly guys on this forum with the same hardware

there is hardly a demand for a standardized config

and we have genkernel which is a generic kernel,

maybe those binary kernel can be abused / reused for htis purpose.

A kernel seed is a big mess to maintain, as every new kernel release introduce / drop config options and the user space always evolve.

we are not windi 95 platform where the same software is used for 20 years.

--

Use genkernel and your kernel trouble may be solved / use the kernel from sysrescue-cd

[khayyam]

[yldouright]

tw04l124
I look at this as addressing the inefficiency of duplicate effort and not as an act of laziness. Ideally, you want a configuration script which will acoomodate a range of values for each component group. For example:

1. a script which optimizes for processors with the same socket so that you can take advantage of all the features available to that CPU but tick off the features that aren't available.
2. a script which creates a kernel that optimizes its operation during boot up for a range of memory bandwidth configurations.
3. a script which creates a kernel that dynamically optimizes the disk I/Oat boot up for access time and bandwidth.

These seem to be very doable and if that is so, why couldn't the same kind of systemic customization be done for standardized hardware like that described in the first post of this thread?

[1clue]

Kernel-seeds was awesome, but really nothing beats keeping track of things yourself.

I maintain a script and two files. They check the config I'm building for values I want, and prints any line not found and any line whose value is not what I expect.

kcheck:

[1clue]

Note that I don't keep every last little option in there, only my deal-breakers.

Any hardware support I actually rely on, any functionality I pay attention to.

I suppose you could build these up to be complete, but the more complete they are the higher maintenance they become. The kernel config is a fluid space. Each new kernel changes some things around as well as adding new functionality. If the kernel config changes one of the values you have in these files, a line is printed and you have to go figure out what happened. It may be a setting wrong or it may be something that changed in the kernel.

[khayyam]

[yldouright]

khayyan
I think I get what you're saying, the parameters need to be input before you can compile or there is no optimization. There has to be some utility that can output all the relevant hardware specs of the system in a form readable by the compiler. If there isn't one, why hasn't someone made it? There is no reason why this process shouldn't be automated. Why can't a basic kernel dynamically compile the memory and disk subsystem at boot time? I remember a little program on the classic mac called silverlining which ran sample read and write scripts to disk to sample different drivers. You chose the best performing driver after these short tests which took about 3 minutes on a 68020 processor with drives of that era. The drivers you selected from were optimized for disk access, latency and throughput and the results were dramatic in some cases with a 260% speed improvement! Given the power of processors today, it seems plausible that these kind of optimizations could be done at boot time. I have nowhere near the skills to do something like this but my gut tells me it's doable and worth doing.

1clue
Thanks.

[Ant P.]

[1clue]

[khayyam]

[yldouright]

khayyan and 1clue
You've both put me on a steep learning curve I may not be able to climb. I thank you both for your attention.

[Tony0945]

[1clue]

It might be interesting to have a wiki or handbook tutorial to see what hardware is on your box, verify kernel options for it and then look at what portage configuration might be dictated from it.

Re: Realtek. I have some hardware yet with Realtek nics. As soon as somebody pointed out the downfalls of these (high interrupt rates, high cpu overhead) I stopped using them and went with Intel. Things work much more smoothly with Intel nics. The LAN throughput is the same, but Realtek throws a lot more interrupts at the CPU than Intel does, which slows down everything else. If you have high cpu load you might choose Intel. They're only slightly more expensive.

Edit: I also noticed that if you buy only motherboards with Intel nics built in, they tend to have higher quality components in general and work more easily with Linux.

[Tony0945]

[Proinsias]

modprobed-db in Arch keeps track of modules loaded over time. It was a lazy way for me to run slimmer kernels and avoid interacting with the linux kernel config.

[1clue]