Autonomously Generating An Ideal Kernel Configuration

[SkyHiRider]

Will this module work only on Ubuntu or will it be compatible with all the Debian based systems?

[FireBurn]

I'm sure I could come up with something to make it work like that to optimize it even further in terms of what modules are needed based upon the current hardware, but I probably wouldn't end up investing that much time into this module unless it becomes financed by a PTS Commercial client.

If you didn't make modules but instead built in it would be easier to build and test, plus the kernels (which are around 2MB each) could be kept and reused for further tests without recompiling them

[n0nsense]

and i really forgot to mention multislot/multilib.
You can have two (or more) versions of same thing installed and working.
There are almost always more than one version available by default (and more in overlays).

[DeepDayze]

Automating kernel configuration makes sense if it is done right and not just based on benchmarks. Would make sense if the generator program would take into account mainly the hardware present as well as architecture-specific tweaks plus any user specified settings

[grigi]

Same findings here. I can setup a full Gentoo desktop in a quarter the time it takes to beat Ubuntu into installing the required developer libraries. It is seriously a pain. And don't say apt-get build-dependencies, since that still doesn't install half the stuff I use.

Gentoo is not for those that want the latest and greatest, it is for those that want a continuously upgrading system, where I can choose to have a small part run the latest & greatest. E.g. only when you NEED a bleeding edge version of PERL, for some new feature, you then mark PERL as "run at latest unstable" and the rest of your system is perfectly stable.

I don't really care about the performance, but I don't want to waste a week getting my notebook's audio working again after upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 (like half my office did) (And do that twice a year would drive me round the bend)

Although, I install Ubuntu for my parents system, since they don't really demand much of it, and I think they appreciate the extra polish :-)

[n0nsense]

Nice... xD

This is not necessarily true.
I run Gentoo on my main machine since 2006.
and various binary distros on HTPC, laptops and of course two computers at my parents home.
I had enough problems from each to say that Gentoo saves time in long run for me.
All various incompatibility issues and wait 6 month or more to the next distro release or compile it yourself or use broken PPA (comunity for SuSe and whatever) caused me to spend much more time to maintain those Ubuntu/OpenSuse. Even Sabayon almost in the black list.
So if you want the latest and greatest and don't want to reinstall your OS, I found Gentoo the most flexible, customizable and faster OS.
And compilation time isn't issue anymore. They are short enough on my two years old C2Q + 8GB RAM. Mostly they comparable to binary installation.

Back to the topic. My .config probably started on 2.4.x
it is reviewed and updated when:

• New hardware installed
• New kernel released with relevant (to my system) changes

I just like to keep it as small and simple as possible.
But this might help to find how to make it even faster
Thanks Michael, you are doing great job. I hope that it will reach the point where it can be used for "real life" benchmarks and not only compare the results with other machines.
Like the HD playback. It meaningless with current files and you can not conclude if some system will or will not be able to playback blue ray movie based on this tests.

[nanonyme]

Yeah it might sounds useful but to me a fulling working distro with vanilla kernel and doing what it is supposed to do, with no crashing and no major usability issues is what I really want, unfortunately non of current distros does that.

Same, really. I do compile my own kernels too. But that's mostly because I pull from the development git trees. Otherwise I wouldn't really bother, Fedora has new enough kernels. :3

[yotambien]

Would it be possible to create a utility that looks at the output of lspci and lsusb and creates a simple cut down kernel config with only the bare minimum required switched on?

I think I saw something that did that. It would look at the running modules rather than at the output of lspci, but I can't remember what, where or how (perhaps I'm imagining it). To quickly find the device drivers from the device ids you could use http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/

[Smorg]

It's worth mentioning Pappy's kernel seeds:

http://www.kernel-seeds.org/

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-801641-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html

This is the best resource around users looking for some mostly reliable information on kernel configuration, along with config files with sane defaults. Much thanks to him for his efforts.

As far as the idea of building a kernel based upon a benchmark - this sounds like a bad idea. Most kernel options aren't exactly "tunables" that you select in the interest of performance. You mostly enable support for the the features you need and the hardware you have. A benchmark isn't going to indicate that.

[FunkyRider]

Yeah it might sounds useful but to me a fulling working distro with vanilla kernel and doing what it is supposed to do, with no crashing and no major usability issues is what I really want, unfortunately non of current distros does that.