Optimized kernel builds: the straight dope

[John Richard Moser]

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Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 09:50:38PM -0500, Scott White wrote:
>> Regardless this makes sense to me and I'm in favor of it.  Having run Ubuntu
>> on several different architectures, Intel 686, Intel SMP + AMD64, I can't
>> say I've seen any obvious difference.  My only question is that it doesn't
>> seem that benchmarks were done in applications that wouldn't leverage many
>> instructions opened up in recent architectures or applications (such as
>> multimedia) or that are SMP driven such as MySql or high-end graphics work
>> (even games).
> 
> The use of newer instruction sets by applications is irrelevant to this
> test; you can still run i686 instructions regardless of which kernel you
> use.  We are only measuring the impact of building the kernel differently,
> not applications.  I would very much like to see similar data for that, of
> course, but so far no one has taken up the challenge.
> 

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-i686

[...]

> If we can resolve the SMP issues with those few drivers, then we can ship a
> single optimal kernel for everyone, which will be even better still.  Ben is
> collecting a list of the SMP-unfriendly drivers now.
> 

That would be awesome.

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