Questions on compiling kernels - Linux

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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Getting a PPC G5 soon, I think, and I am curious if I should recompile the linux kernel for the machine I get. From what I have seen the default install runs like shit and people just accept it for what it is. Well, thats not good enough. With that I wonder if gentoo will be my OS of choice but I'll be damned if I touch that piece of crap again.

What will be the benefits of recompiling the kernel though? Should I bother? I know that a G5 (might have been a quad but dualies are way more common) can be faster than a 3770K if actually utilized correctly rather than lazily put together. Thats why things like MorphOS are blazingly fast. Hardly anyone actually builds for PPC correctly, even when they were popular. I'm also not paying 180 dollars for an active OS that has no active app support so morph is out of the question :P

Opinions? I realize that someone might know of something to do but that I am also probably on my own here.

Edit: I have also looked at BSD, which more or less, looks like its been built correctly.

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Look man it can be faster but it never will be because of how many memory management issues. To understand this and why it will ALWAYS occur comes down to endianess of the processor see the stack goes in the reverse order... And you start at the top and the problem with that is that a stack overflow will occur when you run out of space vs little endianess where it just starts overwriting your stack which is bad to but it's not a memory leak... So the processors inherently is flawed and no kernel can fix all of that

That being said if you can build in protections to prevent most of them good luck and I hope it goes well

1 Like
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I'll take that as a challenge.

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Also xdr with fthe xell procs fixed those issues. Otherwise the ps3 would not have sold.

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No actually the PS3 has the same issues... there are memory leaks.. you just dont see them in game.. and they rarely cause an issue in game but when they do I have seen playstation graphics lag and what not

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Interesting question.

I had got a G4 PowerBook and I had the same thought.
I ended up going Ubuntu PPC as the thought of compiling the full system which take 12hrs minimum on my x99 system on the G4 didn't excite me.

binary system could be better and roll a custom kernel.

BSD could be cool I would love to hear about how you go