n00b kernel question

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

Does trimming your kernel down make it "better"?

As in take up less memory therefore making the PC quicker..?

Would It be better to configure modules into ther kernel once I know ther work as modules?
Or should I leave them out as modules to be loaded after the kernel has loaded.. ?
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andrewy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 602

Compiling less options in the kernel makes the kernel smaller, which takes up a few less kb of memory. I believe it also improves the speed, but not necessarily a significant amount.
If there's something you know you will use, it's better to compile it into the kernel than to compile it as a module, this will give you a slight performance boost (not necessarily noticeable)

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

andrewy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 602

Other than wasting memory and possibly slowing the kernel down? no.
I compile anything that I know I'm going to use into the kernel, while the stuff that I only use sometimes gets compiled as a module.

ewan.paton · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 1:03 pm Post subject:

come on if i compile everything into the kernel its under 2 megs how much free memory do you need, modules are usefull if you need a boot floppy or need to keep uptime and swap modules that have security patches but normal users should just compile everything in
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andrewy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 602

then why does genkernel compile everything as modules, and not just compile everything into the kernel?
RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc, all do the same with their kernels..

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

jsinger · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2003 Posts: 16

Some history -- before modules were available (they arrived in 2.0, IIRC) everything had to be compiled into the kernel. Distros shipped a giant kernel covering pretty much all hardware, that was even more inefficient on the old early 90's hardware people were frequently using. The notion that compiling your kernel gives you a great performance advantage dates back to that situation.

Today, kernels are much smaller as vendors compile everything as modules (that, by the way, is why they compile everything as modules -- they're building for *all* hardware!) and systems have far more capacity. So, today, the benefit of compiling your own is much less.

lbrtuk · l33t Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 910

When you're trying to diagnose a hardware problem, being able to insmod rmmod and modprobe are vital.

HydroSan · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 7:50 pm Post subject:

Some things work better inside the kernel, some outside. ALSA/OSS is something that should be a module, as it is generally better and more managable than if it is 'statically' built into the kernel. USB, Filesystem, Hardware (IDE, AGP, Chipset, etc) should ALWAYS be built into the kernel, if not just for simplicities sake. But as I've said, I've had much better results using ALSA as a module than statically.
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