4 ms·

Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was col

• II2II 1y ago
  I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
  • bombcar 1y ago
    That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time. I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
    • II2II 1y ago
      The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
      • bombcar 1y ago
        The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instructions. I always found that optimizing for size and using the exact march/mcpu worked nicely. But the biggest part I liked was being able to turn off features I didn’t need (like mpg123 in a headless server NOT pulling in X).