When I began using Linux ~18 years ago, my PC sported an astounding 4 MB (that's megabytes) of RAM and was powered by a 486 processor that ran at a whopping 25 MHz.
Even though it took hours for a kernel to compile (as opposed to mere minutes now), it was worth it. At the time, having the absolute latest and greatest kernel was truly a necessity, depending on your hardware. Besides, one could fire off the compilation process before she went to bed for the night so it's not as if you sat around watching the scrolling text and watching for the build to finish.
The effects of building my own kernels were noticeable. If I simply included everything and the kitchen sink -- like today's distribution-provided kernels do -- it's quite possible that my machine might not have successfully booted up after I installed the new kernel, updated my symlinks, and re-ran LILO.
Every time I ran "make menuconfig", "do I compile 'x' into the kernel or as a module?" is a question I had to ask myself over and over again. Deciding wrong quite possibly meant wasting several hours worth of my time.
Today? I'm typing this on a laptop with eight 2.7 GHz cores, 32 GIGABYTES of RAM and a terabyte of storage (roughly 8,000 times as much RAM and storage as that old PC and somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 times the amount of processing power).
I cannot remember the last time that I configured and built a kernel by hand. The optimizations that were once so critical are now a thing of the very, very distant past.
Even though it took hours for a kernel to compile (as opposed to mere minutes now), it was worth it. At the time, having the absolute latest and greatest kernel was truly a necessity, depending on your hardware. Besides, one could fire off the compilation process before she went to bed for the night so it's not as if you sat around watching the scrolling text and watching for the build to finish.
The effects of building my own kernels were noticeable. If I simply included everything and the kitchen sink -- like today's distribution-provided kernels do -- it's quite possible that my machine might not have successfully booted up after I installed the new kernel, updated my symlinks, and re-ran LILO.
Every time I ran "make menuconfig", "do I compile 'x' into the kernel or as a module?" is a question I had to ask myself over and over again. Deciding wrong quite possibly meant wasting several hours worth of my time.
Today? I'm typing this on a laptop with eight 2.7 GHz cores, 32 GIGABYTES of RAM and a terabyte of storage (roughly 8,000 times as much RAM and storage as that old PC and somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 times the amount of processing power).
I cannot remember the last time that I configured and built a kernel by hand. The optimizations that were once so critical are now a thing of the very, very distant past.