Optimized kernel builds: the straight dope

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 04:11:02PM -0400, John Richard Moser wrote:
> 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

Unlike with the kernel, it should be straightforward to benchmark real
workloads as well as artificial benchmarks.  For example, a web server
benchmark, system boot process, graphics benchmarks...this would require
rebuilding many system components in order to construct a compelling test,
but that's mostly a matter of CPU cycles.

-- 
 - mdz