Re: kernel options for cd project with processor family

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 08:49:39PM +1000, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
 > I'm working on the ghost for linux project, which uses various 
 > kernels. The older version 0.14 version had two kernels that support 
 > some configurations. I've added a number of additional builds 
 > adding extra features, but left earlier version in case the later 
 > additions didn't work with hardware. The bzImage6 is the latest and 
 > it works with most hardware, but I found it didn't work on a K6, since 
 > it was build with the Pentium Pro Family. I was able to build one with 
 > the K6 family, and it worked. I had used one of the original kernels 
 > with a K6 before, but this one had a network card that wasn't 
 > supported by it. 
 > 
 > I've built a test set of kernels with the same configuration as the 
 > bzImage6, but changed the Processor family. Below is a list of the 
 > build. I'm interested in which ones would make a difference. I would 
 > think that the 386 version would probable work on all hardware, but 
 > at what cost in performance for creating and restoring the disk 
 > images. G4L uses basically dd, gzip, lzop, bzop, ncftpget, and 
 > ncftpput. With all these images, the g4l iso image is 50MB. 

Your workload is going to be almost entirely IO bound, with
the only CPU intensive parts being 99% in userspace. So any
performance gains by tuning the kernel for a specific CPU are
likely to be unnoticable.  I'd go with a single image supporting
the lowest hardware you intend to support.

CPU tuned variants of gzip/bzip may be more noticable however.

		Dave

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