On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 06:25, Mike Manchester wrote:
> Someone posed this question to me the other day and though I think I
> know the answer, I'm not sure.
>
> If the kernel is recompiled to take advantage of the processor in your
> system. Assuming that the installed kernel is for a 486 processor, not
> sure if that is the case or do the newer distro's like Redhat install
> the proper kernel for you hardware.
Most distro's are built as "i386", meaning they are not optimized for
anything more than a base i386 and should run on most PC hardware
without incident.
You typically need to select architecture specific packages built with
"i686" optimizations by hand.
> Is it better to download, build and install from source RPMS rather than
> binary RPMS or does it matter?
Is it better? No. Unless you change the .spec file from the SRPM to
compile with "i686" optimizations, you're usually only going to build
"i386" friendly binaries.
> Also is it worth while to recompile the kernel?
Always. The more hardware specific you can build a kernel to be toward
your hardware, the faster your system will be. This is really the best
thing you can do to improve the performance of your box.
As for building packages from source: it will speed things up, but it's
a general PITA to maintain. The best bet is to find a distribution tuned
to your hardware, or use a source based distribution like Gentoo that
builds everything from source anyway.
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> <ian@blenke.com>
http://ian.blenke.com
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