Page 1 of 1
What's the best kernel?
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 11:01 am
by Tsuroerusu
OK, here's the deal, I just had a listen to TLLTS episode 102 and the interview with John Goerzen sparked an idea, I went to his Debian From Scratch site, used the instructions to manually bootstrap Debian Sarge on to my Xbox, works great, now I've compiled two kernels, a vanilla kernel (2.6.15.4) with Xbox patches and a Debian kernel (2.6.
with Xbox patches. Which one would provide the best combo of performance/stability/relieabilty/...... and which one would all in all be the better choice? Debian vs. Vanilla!
Also, do anyone know of some simple commandline benchmarking tools for Linux?
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 11:48 am
by Gomer_X
It would be easier to answer the question "which car is better." Better for what? It's really going to depend heavily on your hardware, your goals, and how the kernels were compiled.
As far as benchmarking, look at the "time" function. 'man time' should get you started. Boot with both kernels (time that with a watch), and time some common tasks with the time function. Let us know what your results are.
Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 12:04 pm
by Tsuroerusu
Gomer_X wrote:It would be easier to answer the question "which car is better." Better for what? It's really going to depend heavily on your hardware, your goals, and how the kernels were compiled.
The Xbox's hardware is basically a Pentium3/Celeron hybrid at 700 MHz, with a chipset very similar to nForce2, 64 MB of RAM, 120 GB 7200 RPM drive (I replaced the original one), since the Xbox is fixed hardware, I stripped the kernels down a lot, and compiled everything that was needed for boot, and a good amount of the language stuff (It's for a file server, so I can't have the filenames go weird because someone don't want to use Unicode or the opposite) into the kernel, because I hate keeping track of modules, and the amount of device drivers the Xbox needs is very limited, and also I just feel more comfortable having stuff compiled into the kernel when I can and it's practical.
Gomer_X wrote:As far as benchmarking, look at the "time" function. 'man time' should get you started. Boot with both kernels (time that with a watch), and time some common tasks with the time function. Let us know what your results are.
Which system intensive, common tasks would you suggest o' wise one?
(It's meant as a good joke)
Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 11:00 am
by Gomer_X
Tsuroerusu wrote:Gomer_X wrote:As far as benchmarking, look at the "time" function. 'man time' should get you started. Boot with both kernels (time that with a watch), and time some common tasks with the time function. Let us know what your results are.
Which system intensive, common tasks would you suggest o' wise one?
(It's meant as a good joke)
What are you trying to optimize? I guess anything you can run as a single command rather than a daemon would work.
If you're running it as a file server, try doing scp of a file from a remote box using both kernels. Anything you're doing regularly with the machine would be would be worth timing just to see if there's much of a difference. You may find that there's not much of an advantage of one kernel over the other.
Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 11:21 am
by Tsuroerusu
Gomer_X wrote:[What are you trying to optimize? I guess anything you can run as a single command rather than a daemon would work.
If you're running it as a file server, try doing scp of a file from a remote box using both kernels. Anything you're doing regularly with the machine would be would be worth timing just to see if there's much of a difference. You may find that there's not much of an advantage of one kernel over the other.
It will be running as a file server, so I need reliability and security, and since I have a good router, the security thing is almost bulletproof from external intrusion, so I reliability is the big thing, since the Xbox uses a standard IDE connection and shares the same channel with the DVD drive I doubt you can tune the kernel than I have already done. I'm sadly not familiar with the scp command, could you give me a reallife example of it?
Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 11:43 am
by Gomer_X
scp is a secure copy command. It works over ssh. If your Xbox file server is call 'xfile', and you're on another system, you'd do
Code: Select all
scp xfile://home/user/bigfile.txt .
The '.' at the end of the command is intentional, and is a shortcut for 'here'. This command would copy the file 'bigfile.txt' from the directory '/home/user/' on the server.