Re: Open Discussion, kernel in production environment

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 23:57 +0200, Marcin Hlybin wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I always configure and compile a kernel throwing out all unusable options and 
> I never use modules in production environment (especially for the router). 
> But my superior has got the other opinion - he claims that distribution 
> kernel is quite good and in these days optimization has no sense because of 
> powerful hadrware. 


he's basically right; the gain you get by disabling the generic things a
distribution enabled is way down in the noise. There are some
compromises a distribution makes to keep the number of kernels they ship
down, and I suspect the worst possible case would add up to say 5%.

(on a Fedora / RHEL that would probably be a SMP system with less than
1Gb of ram)

On the plus side you get the maintenance, building and integration done
for you, including the security fixes. 

There is a third "advantage" in using a distro kernel; there is less
chance of a mistake in the sense of picking a config option that turns
out to be really bad in hindsight. 

Now that doesn't mean that I want to discourage people from building
their own kernel, far from that, but at the same time, the advantages
you get shouldn't be overstated and in a business environment it is
probably not a good use of time nowadays.