benefits of recompiling a linux kernel?

[nortexoid]

so i know jack about linux except for my awesomely brief and insightful installations of corel linux and mandrake 8 way back...
mandrake 8 set up all my hardware fine and everythign that i managed to try seemed to function ok...so what's the point of recompiling the kernel?..is it only to remove the additional unneeded bloat for, say, faster booting and less memory usage?

and how does recompiling work - that is, in layman's terms.

i'd like to eventually build up some basic knowledge of linux so that one day when I get sick of gaming I can toss my windows OS out the window, spitting at it on the way out...but of course, seeing how i don't evne know basic bash commands except for a few similar to DOS based commands, i'm currently utterly hopeless...

laugh at me.

 

[n0cmonkey]

You can get rid of clutter, make a smaller kernel, and add optimizations. Basically how it works is you select what you want to go into the kernel or take out what you dont want, enter a few commands, cp one file, edit /etc/lilo.conf/ reboot. Pretty simple really.

 

[Nothinman]

The benefits are nearly as great as they used to be, most distributions give you a totally module kernel already so even if they compiled the module for something you'll never use it's not using any resources because it's not loaded. It's most usefull for making really small kernels for boot disks where space is really tight or if you need some special feature not in the officlal kernel and only available as a kernel source patch. It's not bad to learn and get comfortable with, but it's not necessary by any means.

You do get to compile for specific architecures that enable some optimizations, but it's not always a noticable change.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Im anti-LKM (Loadable Kernel Module) so I recompile my own

 

[nortexoid]

"you sleect what you want to go into the kernel"....

just what would I be selecting, is what i'm not understanding...I don't get what the kernel consists of...mysterions?

excessively fast responses tho....u even sport the same faces...i'm scared.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< "you sleect what you want to go into the kernel"....

just what would I be selecting, is what i'm not understanding...I don't get what the kernel consists of...mysterions?

excessively fast responses tho....u even sport the same faces...i'm scared. >>



Dont be scared, you didnt ask a stupid question

Well, most of the things you choose for the kernel would be drivers or other features (like iptables).

 

[Nothinman]

Dont be scared, you didnt ask a stupid question

Haha that was genuinely funny.

just what would I be selecting, is what i'm not understanding...I don't get what the kernel consists of...mysterions?

Mostly drivers. IDE chipsets, SCSI controllers, network cards, etc. There are also things like network protocols like IPX, TCP/IP, LAT, etc and things like IP routing, NAT, etc.

There are 3 config interfaces you can use to pick these things, one interview-like which asks the questions in order, one menu for the console that you can scroll around in and one meny system for X if you want to use a mouse.

Im anti-LKM (Loadable Kernel Module) so I recompile my own

Once again I follow the opposite philosophy, I make everything possible a module so I get the most flexibility =)

 

[nortexoid]

wow, that's good to know...that is, that there's interfaces/menus to help...

what distribution do u guys recommend and for what reason?...that is, one w/ a nice looking GUI (kde/gnome) and relatively easy to configure (via GUI) and use...

 

[n0cmonkey]

KDE and gnome can be used on pretty much most main stream linux distros and BSDs. I like Slackware, and I recently started using Debian. Both have been pretty good so far.