Kernel configuration options
John Richard Moser
nigelenki at comcast.net
Tue Jan 1 14:10:19 EST 2008
I'm not sure about some of the kernel configuration options. A few
minor things stick out in my mind; I don't know the rationale behind
some of these things and am curious about developer decisions and
thoughts on how to build the kernel.
* CONFIG_NO_HZ + CONFIG_HZ=100?
* SLAB vs SLUB
* Some debugging stuff
* More debugging stuff
* Building stuff as modules
First off I noticed CONFIG_NO_HZ=y and CONFIG_HZ=100; is this a quirk of
the kernel's general configuration? As I understand, these options
should be mutually exclusive because CONFIG_HZ is a parameter of a
scheduler using a different methodology than CONFIG_NO_HZ...
Another thing is I noticed CONFIG_SLAB=y, but the SLUB allocator is
supposed to be a faster generic replacement for SLAB.[1] Is there a
reason the XO doesn't use it?
I'm also noticing some things like KALLSYMS and BUG(), BSD process
accounting, and the like. KALLSYMS, BUG(), and printk() are useful; on
a true embedded device I'd say remove 'em but I can't justify it here...
BSD process accounting and auditd support though?
In the same line, a lot of debugging options are in use. I'm using
Build 653, I guess it may be a developer's build and thus there's a lot
of debugging stuff; but in the final should things like CONFIG_PROFILING
, CONFIG_KPROBES, CONFIG_DEBUG_FS, CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS,
CONFIG_SCHEDSTATS, CONFIG_TIMER_STATS, CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT,
CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK ... be removed?
Finally, I'm noticing a lot of stuff can be built as modules, but is
built in. Networking in its entirety; sound drivers; mouse; and USB
(the mouse looks like it's PS2) can be loaded by HAL and UDEV, but this
will increase boot time (then again, HAL apparently needs to be fixed
anyway[2], so this could be encouraging?). More interesting to me
however is that EXT2, EXT3, Joliet, ZISOFS, RAMFS, NFS, and possibly
PROMFS because I don't think JFFS2 depends on it BUT I'm not sure if
it's used at some point before it can be loaded as a module.
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/229984/
[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/192214/
--
Bring back the Firefox plushy!
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Is_the_Firefox_plush_gone_for_good
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322367
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