Compiling yr own Linux--gentoolinux

D

I have heard that there is a distro which allows you to compile yr own kernal according to the required modules(Device drivers) for the specific hardware. As only required modules are compiled tjhe kernal is going to be really fast...I suppose the Linux distro was Gentoo..
Has anyone tried to compile his own hardware dependent version...

N

I think you are speaking about LFS.

U

You can compile your own kernel on any distribution you choose, but in distributions like gentoo and LFS, you are compiling the whole system from scratch, including the linux kernel.

By the way, modern distributions use modularised kernels, in which device drivers are not built in to the kernel, but instead the ones you need are loaded in as modules. Because of this, there is only very little speed difference between a self compiled kernel and a pre compiled one.

Gentoo is all abt choices, You choose everything and anything to create a distro as YOU like. If you want to put your name in the distro, you can of-course build an LFS.

...By the way, modern distributions use modularised kernels

But again by custom kernel compiling You can remove many unwanted builtin drivers and modules.

U

Removing modules just saves some disk space, if one doesn't load them up at boot time, they cause no performance penalty. And many distributions use init ramdisk's such that support for SCSI, SATA is not built in to the kernel.

However, you can probably get a noticable performance boost if you compile a kernel which is patched with the unofficial -ck set of patches. I have never tried this so I really dunno.

But of course, compiling a kernel can be a great learning procedure for sure

. I used a custom compiled kernel when I was running slackware, but now in arch linux I stick to the stock kernel, and with frequent updates I find myself running the latest stable kernel a day or two after its release.

@Ujjwal, Sorry for going a bit offtopic, but plz tell me a bit more abt how you feel of arch.?

Of course i went to their site. I have good opinion for LFS, gentoo and slacky!

U

Arch is similiar to slackware in many aspects, but adds a lot on top of that. It has a good binary package manager, which is (almost) as good as apt-get. In addition, it has a source based system called ABS. This system is not as powerful as gentoo, but it works well.

The whole arch system is i686 optimised, so it needs a modern (P2/athlon or above) to run, but runs a bit faster on this hardware.

Its init scripts are simple, and not System V based. They are similar to slackware, but more flexible in some ways. The basic configuration is managed by a central file called rc.conf. It maintains a list of daemons to start, network settings, and other options.

Arch is a rolling distro, so if you update using the package manager, you are always running the latest version of the distro, which is pretty up-to-date. The arch system is quite dynamic, and there are quite a few innovative changes, for example when udev came out, arch was using a very fast system called hwdetect to detect and load modules based on information exported by udev.

But there are some problems. Sometimes major updates (udev, Xorg7) may break the system, so one needs to know how to fix things in an emergency.

To have atleast a part of this post on topic, here is a link to a good kernel compile guide -

*www.digitalhermit.com/linux/Kernel-Build-HOWTO.html

Even Gentoo uses /etc/rc.conf for system administration. So that's good stuff on arch linux. What abt the binaries? Are they i686 optimised too?

U

Yeah, all open source software present in the repositories is i686 optimised.