Those who custom configure their kernel: what did you gain?
Curious to know the coolest things you achieved by configuring your kernel. I know kernel config can be boring, but I’m hoping someone will have an impressive answer.
For me I have a very lightweight kernel that runs wayland on nvidia without any issues to date.
And I configured my kernel to support VFIO (Virtual Function Input Output).
So I can fully pass through one of my GPUs to my Ameliorated Windows KVM,
which I use for both work and gaming.
Amazing, basically native speeds,
currently playing Horizon Forbidden West with maxed out graphics and DRS disabled at a steady 60-80 FPS.
Previously I also played Horizon Zero Dawn in it, also maxed out graphics, steady locked 100 FPS,
below is a benchmark comparison of HZD in the Linux host OS and the Windows KVM guest OS: workstation-gaming-linux-vs-windows
Has this gotten any easier to do? I set it up a few years ago, it was painful to do and maintain so I let it slide. You were writing all sorts of scripts to specify the passthrough devices and then they’d stop working so you had to track down what was failing and update. Then there was iommu so you had to be careful which groups you added devices to.
Gotta admit, it was very hard to setup initially.
However it’s been working perfectly ever since I did.
Been using it for about a year or 2 now.
Also when I linked the Arch wiki,
I noticed in it’s article that there’s now a gpu-passthrough-manager,
which will likely make the process of setting up a little bit easier.
Root on Android is a necessity for me.
I’ve been rooting all droids I use for the past 10 years or so.
Imagine using Linux as a power user,
without being able to use sudo/su.
Also, Magisk does not just allow any application to access root, you have to manually allow apps to make use of it.
Just like administrator rights on any other OS,
things only go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, and then grant rights to something malicious.
Not for myself but a client who was running a game server. He wanted to tweak the number of ticks/second that the kernel interacted with CPU. Didn’t even know that this was a parameter and after a few attempts, according to him, never went on that server myself, made a huge difference and he claimed having grabbed a good part of the market because of that.
After that familiarized myself more with the stuff in there. But that was a good while ago, before most of you guys were born.
Back when I was still using Gentoo, configuring your own kernel was a rite of passage. It was kind of fun to try and configure it as minimalist as possible to cut down on the kernel compile time. Also, understanding all the different options and possibilities. And thanks to use flags, you had access to all these different patch sets for the kernel, which took a lot of the pain out of trying things like experimental schedulers or filesystems.
Just download the devel kernel from your distro and go into make menuconfig. I am on an Intel Laptop with recent hardware. No reason to use amd, nvidia etc drivers. And there is a shitload of likely unmaintained drivers for ancient hardware.
As a Linux user of almost 30 years, compiling hundreds of kernels over the years has given me a great appreciation of pre-build kernels, and a profound gratitude for those who package them up into convenient distros that work out of the box and let me get on with the rest of my life.
Well said. I originally compiled my own kernels because I thought it was something you just did to use Linux. I also compiled hundreds of them, probably. Now it’s stock kernel all the way. Not worth the effort and time and headache.
I used Linux for about a decade from the mid nineties then took a break for a few years. When I came back, every distro kernel was precompiled, it was glorious. There was never a day I said to myself “damn, I miss compiling a kernel”.
Absolutely! If you’re doing it to learn something, by all means compile your own kernel. Every Linux user should do that at least once in my opinion. But once the learning is done, the novelty wears off fast and it just becomes tedious.
I’m running a custom kernel on my Arch laptop. It’s a little faster, a little smaller and a little quite more secure. I’m also running custom kernel which enables adiantum encryption on old phone with postmarketOS.
Years ago (2006-ish), I ran Gentoo on a 300mhz ultra low power system I used for an irc & web server. I gained LOTS of speed and lowered power draw even further while also enabling the hardware acceleration the board had for ssl encryption and video encoding. The whole thing would pull <5 watts and be super stable. It was well worth it.
But now days a Pi zero would trounce it in both low power draw and speed with stock kernels and I don’t really care enough to try to squeeze more out.
Customising the kernel just means something works properly in rare hardware configurations like you described. It’s something which he who uses the general hardware (like an X86 desktop) can’t easily see or understand because the ‘stock’ kernel is already working properly.
I used to manually compile with the Linux-VServer patches, before Debian started shipping a pre-patched kernel.
Linux-VServer was kinda like LXC or OpenVZ. I was using it around 2008 or so as LXC wasn’t quite ready for use in production yet (was still far from finished) and OpenVZ didn’t support Debian hosts.
The secureblue image I use disables numerous kernel modules, and enables many kernel mitigation argument.
The performance impact is minimal, hopefully that means a more secure system? I honestly don’t know, nor do I change the default recommended by the developer.
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