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Old 9th January 2010
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Budel - the Netherlands
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FreeBee View Post
Some reasons why it is forbidden to build a custom kernel:

* You do not need to, normally: but I want to learn and experiment. Define "normal".
* You will not get a faster system: I don't care. Define "fast".
* You are likely to make a less reliable machine: define "less reliable".
* You will not get any support from developers: is that logical?
* You will be expected to reproduce any problem with a GENERIC kernel before developers take any problem report seriously: I might be expected to fly to the moon as well before eating tofu :-)).
* Users and developers will laugh at you when you break your system: is that "civilized"?
* Custom compiler options usually do a better job of exposing compiler problems than improving system performance: then create a better compiler.
The only reason why I referred you to the OpenBSD FAQ about custom kernels, is that I wanted to show, that according to the OpenBSD people, a smaller kernel doesn't bring you advantages in speed.
You don't need to believe them

You are using FreeBSD, which has a huge number of developers and resources compared with the much smaller OpenBSD project. Just compare the number of FreeBSD ports with the number of OpenBSD ports.

The OpenBSD developers rather spend time on improving OpenBSD than solving custom kernel compilation problems on the mailing lists.
In their opinion, decreasing kernel size is not relevant nowadays. People now have a couple of gigabytes of memory in their machines.
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