Curious to know the coolest things you achieved by configuring your kernel. I know kernel config can be boring, but I’m hoping someone will have an impressive answer.

For me I have a very lightweight kernel that runs wayland on nvidia without any issues to date.

  • xycu@programming.dev
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    7 months ago

    I do it because I can… I read release notes on every update and once you’ve configured a kernel for a particular machine you really don’t need to touch the config, barring major changes like when PATA and SATA merged. Or of course if I’m adding a new piece of hardware.

    I remove everything I don’t need and compiling the kernel only takes a couple minutes. I use Gentoo and approach everything on my system the same way - remove the things I don’t need to make it as minimal as possible.

    Compiling your own kernel also makes it easier when you need to do a git bisect to determine when a bug was introduced to report it or try to fix it. I’ve also included kernel patches in my build years ago, but haven’t needed to do that in a long time.

    I used to compile a custom kernel for my phone to enable modules/drivers that weren’t included by default by the maintainer.

    It’s not about performance for me, it’s about control.