[Courses][Linux comands] customizing a 2.4 kernel

[Carla Schroder]

On Wednesday 24 March 2004 7:18 pm, Sue Stones wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:46 pm, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > I've been in a kernel building frenzy, so this week's course will be a
> > kernel-building howto. 
> 
> 
> Ok, I've glanced over this, but can't take it in today.  
> 
> My question has always been "Why?"  ie what sort of things require 
> kernel-haking, or building?  How do we know this its the thing to do?

1. To add some functionality it doesn't have
2. To clean all the junk out of a stock kernel. The various distros lard their 
kernels with all kinds of drivers and features you'll never need
3. To optimize it for your hardware. Many distros default to i386, which is 
rather silly for Athlon and P4 users. Plus, I've noticed that many times the 
architecture is wrong- on both my Red Hat and Debian systems, PIII was 
selected . Well both systems are Durons.
4. To fine-tune which things you want statically compiled, or loadable modules
5. You might want to test some alpha features, such as NTFS write, or CD 
packet writing, or some such

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Carla Schroder
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