Condobloke
Well-Known Member
Discussion
A while ago I asked about compiling the kernel on Mint 21 Xfce. Yesterday I finished installing my custom kernel. It took over a day to go through the menuconfig settings. It took three tries to compile totalling about three hours. Basically, anything that implied laptop, Nvidia, or Intel got cut out of the kernel.
The results? I ran benchmarks before and after the install and recorded the avg RAM usage at idle. Benchmarks showed zero significant change but RAM usage went down by 0.5GB which on Xfce was enough to bring me down to 1012MB of RAM usage at idle. (Ryzen 5700G, 32GB RAM)
Would I recommend doing this? It depends! Systems with low physical RAM could benefit but you'd likely need to compile the kernel on a more capable system first. Or if saving any amount of RAM (no matter how big or small) is important to you, it's a good and practical learning experience.
Lastly, according to my google research, the 6.0 kernel is best if you don't have more than 2 NVMe drives as it appears that the Rust driver loses its competitive edge vs C drivers in that use case. 5.19 is probably your best bet for that scenario. I look forward to Rust completely eclipsing C in the probably not so distant future.
A while ago I asked about compiling the kernel on Mint 21 Xfce. Yesterday I finished installing my custom kernel. It took over a day to go through the menuconfig settings. It took three tries to compile totalling about three hours. Basically, anything that implied laptop, Nvidia, or Intel got cut out of the kernel.
The results? I ran benchmarks before and after the install and recorded the avg RAM usage at idle. Benchmarks showed zero significant change but RAM usage went down by 0.5GB which on Xfce was enough to bring me down to 1012MB of RAM usage at idle. (Ryzen 5700G, 32GB RAM)
Would I recommend doing this? It depends! Systems with low physical RAM could benefit but you'd likely need to compile the kernel on a more capable system first. Or if saving any amount of RAM (no matter how big or small) is important to you, it's a good and practical learning experience.
Lastly, according to my google research, the 6.0 kernel is best if you don't have more than 2 NVMe drives as it appears that the Rust driver loses its competitive edge vs C drivers in that use case. 5.19 is probably your best bet for that scenario. I look forward to Rust completely eclipsing C in the probably not so distant future.
