I just built my first kernel!!

[myusername]

I just built my first kernel and I optimized it for a pentium 4!! :) right now its compiling

[Triggerhapp]

Congrats!! But why XD

[myusername]

because I am trying to see how fast I can make my system

[Triggerhapp]

Fair deal! I manage to break most things in my machine, so I shall refrain from squeezing most performance out and be happy with my setup asis for now :P

[fedex1993]

did you build your own kernel on ubuntu i would like to today that for my laptop to speed it up a bunch :)

[Whiffle]

Congrats :) Post again when it boots :D

Kernel compiling really isn't all that bad, is it? :)

[Joeb454]

I've compiled a kernel before :) Admittedly it was in a VM so I couldn't care less if it didn't boot ;)

[aktiwers]

KernelCheck does a great job too.. I both used that and done it manually.. damn it takes a long time to compile :D

[bobdob20]

Ive compiled a kernel before and it booted, but my wireless didn't work so i just went back to the normal kernel.

[aktiwers]

You need to install drivers for that again

[bobdob20]

Which drivers would that be? cos it worked out of the box with the other kernel.

[swoll1980]

Which drivers would that be? cos it worked out of the box with the other kernel.

the driver was already a part of the first kernel

[andrewabc]

Can you post links on what you used to learn how to custom compile the kernel?
I have no idea what to do, but think it would be nice to do for old computers.

[original_jamingrit]

Don't forget to edit Grub so that it's able to boot both your new and old kernel. An annoying mistake to make, whether or not your new one works properly :-P

[aktiwers]

Can you post links on what you used to learn how to custom compile the kernel?
I have no idea what to do, but think it would be nice to do for old computers.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=311158

[odiseo77]

I've compiled the kernel for different reasons (mainly to add some hardware and for experimenting and learning), but I haven't noticed any performance improvement. Maybe I didn't get very well the difference between monolithic kernel and modular kernel (I have a general idea, though) and included lots of stuff and drivers I didn't need (but anyway, it's a good learning experience, besides being fun).

[myusername]

it boots up WAY faster than the stock xubuntu kernel....but my wireless card didn't seem to work even with ndiswrapper so i am on a live cd and ill try it when hardy comes out...and btw here is how i learned to do it
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=311158
http://beginlinux.com/index.php/desktop_training/ubuntu/ubfile_m/ub_compile
definitions of everything you need to turn off:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1174954&postcount=507

[Eclipse.]

KernelCheck is a nice program that will build and install custom kernels for you aswell as leaving a .deb incase you need to reinstall.

I have always had to reinstall my nvidia drivers with new kernels but apart from that using custom kernels is alot better.

Theres a few guides (google is your friend) that give some tips for when configuting which really speed things up alot.

[Whiffle]

I've compiled the kernel for different reasons (mainly to add some hardware and for experimenting and learning), but I haven't noticed any performance improvement. Maybe I didn't get very well the difference between monolithic kernel and modular kernel (I have a general idea, though) and included lots of stuff and drivers I didn't need (but anyway, it's a good learning experience, besides being fun).

Yeah I have too, never got much of a performance boost out of it. I don't even bother on my desktop anymore, sometimes I might on my laptop to get patches for HDAPS or some other such thing.

[myusername]

i didn't really notice a preformance boost but i did notice that my boot up time was about five-ten seconds faster and its a great learning experience

[kinematic]

Kernel compiling is nice and easy once it has become a routine. Right now I'm on 2.6.25-kinematic_17 (the last number being the number of custom kernels I've rolled). I always strip out everything I don't need and compile the file system/disk driver into the kernel so I also don't need and initrd. Small and lean kernels are the way to go for speeding things up.

[andrewabc]

So how do yuo know what to say y/n/m/? to when compiling?
Also once you get to the make xconfig and got all those options how do you know what to keep or lose?
Is there a way for it to know what hardware your computer uses and only use options for it?

I've got one compiling now, but I pressed whatever was the first for all the y/n/m questions and left most of make xconfig the same. Does this mean my custom kernel will be similar to the one already installed?

[fwojciec]

So how do yuo know what to say y/n/m/? to when compiling?
Also once you get to the make xconfig and got all those options how do you know what to keep or lose?
Is there a way for it to know what hardware your computer uses and only use options for it?

Basically the answer to your questions is: you have to know what you're doing. Most distributions provide a one-size-fits-all modular kernel these days that works pretty much as well as a highly customized kernels since, in either case, only the modules that are needed on a particular system are going to be loaded during boot.

Having said that, it's fun and educational to learn how to optimize a kernel for a given set of hardware components, but there isn't an easy solution/guide that will walk you through it. To learn how to do it requires a lot of patience, googling a lot, learning about the hardware your computer uses and how the kernel deals with it, as well as a lot of systematic trial and error with different configuration options.

In general I'd recommend sticking to the default kernel -- unless you're willing to spend a lot of time to overcome a somewhat steep learning curve at first. The performance benefits of having a custom compiled kernel, in most cases, are going to be in the "placebo" range, i.e. negligible.


I've got one compiling now, but I pressed whatever was the first for all the y/n/m questions and left most of make xconfig the same. Does this mean my custom kernel will be similar to the one already installed?

If you actually get it to work at all it'll probably be, essentially, the same as the default kernel.

[andrewabc]

It took an hour to compile my kernel. I had no idea what I was doing.
I booted into it and it got past the ubuntu loading bar, then went to a black screen and did nothing.

My custom kernel image is 510 mb compared to ubuntus 62mb image.

Looks like I'll be sticking with ubuntus kernel for a long time :P

[aimran]

Is it monolithic or is it micro?

[andrewabc]

Is it monolithic or is it micro?

If you are asking me I have no idea. And I deleted the custom kernel already so I won't know.

[Whiffle]

If you're using the ncurses interface to configure your kernel you can press ? and it will provide some help. Knowing what hardware your computer has is often as simple as looking through the output of lspci and dmidecode.