On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 11:25:37AM +0900, Horms wrote: > > There was some discussion of cutting down on the number of flavours. > It all centred around, is there any real benifit. For instance, > it is conventional wisdom that 686 will run faster on a UP box than 686-smp, > but for a typical workload, is it really enough to warrant an extra > flavour. > > To be honest, most of the reason for extra flavours, especially in i386, > comes down to performance. A 686-smp kernel will run faster on a P4 than > a 386 kernel (n.b 386 and 686 are just the flavour names). In that > case its almost certainly worth it. But its not entirely clear there > is enough benifit to warrant all the flavours in between. > > However, as its a performance issue, what is needed is numbers. > I heard that Ubuntu were looking into it, but haven't heard > anything of late. I think I may have mentioned this to you privately but there are some people working on it, here is one approach <http://lwn.net/Articles/160295/> Which looks like it obviates the need, eventually, for distinct -smp and -up builds of the kernel. Couple that with run-time detection of cpu type and 'apt-get install linux-image-2.6.<x>' might be all that is eventually required. Cheers, Anand
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