I have compiled my own kernels for a while now. I started when I got my i7 processor and wanted its turbo boost to work properly. I've since bought an SSD so continue to benefit from a more recent kernel than the repo version.
With my most recent builds, I've started getting weird CPU spikes. While it could be a number of different things causing this, I'd like to focus on getting the kernel "right" and if possible, more optimised than ever.
I follow the "Old-Fashioned Debian" on the Kernel/Compile wiki. I do this because I'm building from a direct download from kernel.org. First questions: Should I get my source from somewhere else and should I use a different build method?
The guide suggests getting the current .config
like so:
cp -vi /boot/config-`uname -r` .config
This is all well and good if your current configuration works well but I'm concerned mine contains a problem... Second question: Is there a good Ubuntu-friendly, i7-friendly default .config
file I can download from somewhere?
There are a lot of kernel patches floating around at the moment. Some promise a more responsive system through patching IO bugs, some give "better" schedulers (BFS, et al) but it's hard to find decent benchmarks to see if these are worthwhile features of if they're just unstable junk. Third: Are there any patches you would apply to 2.6.35 to make it more compatible with Lucid?
I fear it's make menuconfig
where I screw things up. I try to turn off drivers I don't need and select options that look like they'll optimise things but, truth be told, I'm not a kernel developer; I don't know for certain if an option will break everything or even help at all. Fourth: How would you optimise the .config
/build-process for an i7 and SSD?