Kernel Patchsets

[squeegy]

I hope I'm sticking in the guidelines by posting in this forum, but it says making your kernel hum with maximum efficiency so I figure it would be appropriate.

I would like to see what different kernel patchsets people out there use. I figure we could compile a list of different ones with links, and possibly some other information. Here's what I have so far

mm-sources (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/)
wolk (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wolk)
ck (http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/)
lokean (http://www.stijlstek.nl/lokean/)
www.love-sources.org (http://www.love-sources.org) is down at the moment of this post, here are two links containing different versions of the patchset love-sources link 1 (http://oneofone.limitlessfx.com/love-sources/) and link 2 (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jpcox/) I would recommend checking the topic of #love-sources @irc.freenode.net for the latest version of love.

I recently started using 2.6.6-love4 and I am very impressed with my systems performance thus far. I have not done any real benchmarks this is all just based on pure interaction.

Please post any input you have on the subject of different patchsets. If I don't say it now I am sure someone will mention it, but some of these patchsets are very bleeding edge, or even to quote steel300 open heart surgery. They may make your system run better, they may make it run worse, they may even break them in extreme cases.

I thought another good reason to bring this up was Reiser4 patches are included in some of these patchsets. I've been reading a lot of impressing things about it. Although I have also read a lot about it blowing up. :D Once I clear up some space on one of my hard drives I am thinking about testing it out.

[Ludootje]

There's -mjb (Martin J. Bligh, aimed at stability and performance).
There was -ac (alan cox).
There's -pac (post alan cox).

There are others, too. Can think of them right now though...
There's no Reiser4 patchset yet, as Namesys hasn't released any patches yet. They probably will in a month or two (although they've been saying that for a while to be honest:rolleyes: )
If you're interested in this stuff, you really should subscribe to the lkml though, as those announcements are posted there.

edit: Just though of another: -kj (kernel janitors)

[Dark Ninja]

Pardon if this is a stupid question, but how are these kernels patched to make them have a higher performance? Is there an explanation of what is done so they have a better performance?

Also, are there any downsides to using these patched kernels?



Thanks

[Ludootje]

Another patchset: -aa (Andrea Arcangeli, creator of the 2.4 VM, working *hard* on the 2.6 VM)

Dark Ninja:
Downsides: not as much testers as the vanilla tree, so they are more prone to bugs.

How they're patched: well many performance tweaks are made by pretty good developers, for example Andrea's VM patches are supposed to boost performance. Now, to get more testing and of all his changes, Andrea releases his own kernel tree. People use it, report bugs, Andrea fixes them, etc etc. Once Andrea considers his VM patches good enough, he will submit them to Andrew Morton, who will put it into his -mm tree, which is the testing ground for 2.6. (the -mm tree is the most used tree, after Linus's vanilla tree)
When Andrew considers the patches good, he sends them to Linus, and that's how they get into the vanilla kernel.

I hope this explanation makes some sense :)

[Dark Ninja]

Yup. Thank you!

It did raise one more question, though -- how good of a "boost" do these patched kernels provide? Like, I'm basically a web/programming/e-mail type person, so would a patched kernel really improve anything at all for me?


Thanks again for your patience.

[Ludootje]

Some would. Depends what they're aimed at.
-aa might, although I think it's mostly servers etc which will benefit from it.
-ck (con colivas) could help.
-mjb too, I think, although less than -ck
-wolk would be an improvement, but probably not performance-wise, as wolk is aimed as stability and security.
-mm could help, it changes a lot... it's really the big experimental ground, so some changes in -mm can be wonderful for you, while other might be pretty bad for performance. this changes almost every release. for example: there where some scheduler changes after 2.6.1 (I think), these were tested in -mm before. If those scheduler changes are useful to you, using -mm before 2.6.2 was released would've boosted performance.
well the scheduler isn't totally about performance to be exact (it decides what process gets how much cpu time and when), I do think you get my point :)
You should get familiar with recompiling the kernel by hand though before testing those patchsets, though. (or maybe these patchsets are a good way to get familiar with recompiling, I guess you can look at it that way too:))

[sharth]

I use -epia (http://www.epiawiki.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=EpiaKernelAbout) which has some patches for the nehemiah random number generator, some bootsplash stuff, and some other stuff.

http://www.epiawiki.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=EpiaKernelAbout

[squeegy]

Originally posted by Ludootje
There's -mjb (Martin J. Bligh, aimed at stability and performance).
There was -ac (alan cox).
There's -pac (post alan cox).

There are others, too. Can think of them right now though...
There's no Reiser4 patchset yet, as Namesys hasn't released any patches yet. They probably will in a month or two (although they've been saying that for a while to be honest:rolleyes: )
If you're interested in this stuff, you really should subscribe to the lkml though, as those announcements are posted there.

edit: Just though of another: -kj (kernel janitors)

2.6.6-love4 and love5 both have the Reiser4 patches when I wrote the first post. I think someone even made a gentoo LiveCD based on this to use Reiser4.

[edit] 2.6.6-love4 and love5 i believe are both based on mm

[Dark Ninja]

Okay. Well, thank you for the info.

Haha...yeah, I definitely have experience with compiling kernels.:p I've done it multiple times while I help my friends set up their own Gentoo systems. Just compiled 2.6.6 last night. (yay me!)

Anyway, I'll go test those out. Thank you very much for your help.

[Ludootje]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja
Haha...yeah, I definitely have experience with compiling kernels.:p I've done it multiple times while I help my friends set up their own Gentoo systems. Just compiled 2.6.6 last night. (yay me!)

Anyway, I'll go test those out. Thank you very much for your help.
Sorry, didn't mean to offend you or anything :)
Just wanted to make sure you knew this.
Good luck with it!
oh and btw, http://kerneltrap.org is a pretty good site which discusses important lkml discussions, you might be interested in some of the stuff it's got.

[squeegy]

Originally posted by Ludootje
Sorry, didn't mean to offend you or anything :)
Just wanted to make sure you knew this.
Good luck with it!
oh and btw, http://kerneltrap.org is a pretty good site which discusses important lkml discussions, you might be interested in some of the stuff it's got.

Thanks for all the information you've provided. I am going to follow your suggestion and subscribe the lkml. In all the years that I've been using linux, i never took as much interest in kernel development as I have now. I guess thats a good thing!