Recent Fedora Core kernels (plus my SPEC file for 2.6.8-1.541 with Athlon support)

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 11:36:23AM -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
 > Dave Jones wrote:
 > 
 > <snip>
 > > > C. If it doesn't hurt and it would probably help, I don't see what's 
 > > the > matter with making an Athlon-optimized kernel.
 > >
 > >A number of reasons.
 > >- It's one more column in the matrix of supported kernels to worry about.
 > >  This may seem insignificant, but it takes quite a while to push
 > >  a kernel package through the buildsystem given how many variants
 > >  it spits out. On a busy day (like for eg, just before release), it
 > >  can take the better part of a day to get packages built.
 > >- The gain just isn't worth it over the 2.4 kernels.
 > >  Now that the runtime optimisations get performed in 2.6, theres only
 > >  one thing thats missing that would be in an Athlon optimised kernel,
 > >  and thats the optimised copy_page/clear_page, which are really only
 > >  a win when a lot of data is being copied back/forth between the kernel,
 > >  and even then, only under certain usage patterns.  I'll be surprised
 > >  if this shows up on any real-world application.
 > <snip>
 > 
 > Apparently the man who started this thread found his real-world 
 > applications.

I don't see any numbers. There's also nothing specifically
indicating that building for Athlon is why he saw a performance
win. If something else also got disabled (even inadvertantly),
that could also factor into it.

		Dave