There’re many reasons for why I compile the kernel myself. It’s to get some piece of hardware to work that the stock kernel doesn’t support (this is definitely the reason why started compiling the kernel years back), is to get it as fast and slim as possible, it’s to see where the kernel development is at, what new features are added, it’s to know exactly what and why it is working. But I think the biggest reason is because I can.
I’ve been running my work laptop quite happily on a 2.6.15.2 kernel for more than a year. Wireless works, so does sound, gigabit internet, bluetooth, ext3, NTFS, samba and so on. It was dead stable, I had daily hibernation for more than five months before some thoughtless windows colleague turned it off at a conference (he didn’t to it on purpose of course).
However, I switched to the open source radeon driver a while back becaues I was tired of the properiatary one from ATI kept crashing on me. And with this one, 3D acceleration didn’t work. So one day I got fed up with it (although it’s not important, I only use 3D for screensavers) and downloaded the latest kernel, 2.6.21.5, and compiled it with my old config.
After reboot, I got a kernel panic because it couldn’t find the harddisk (!) It turned out that the SATA drivers have moved in the kernel and hence my old config didn’t suffice. I.e. I needed to go through the kernel config and also add firewall support again (this had also moved, again). After my third recompile, everything worked.
Of course, the firmware for my wireless, ipw2200, didn’t work with the new kernel, so I also needed to fetch the latest firmware and replace the old one. No big deal some would say, but still a job that needs to be done.
You may ask why I went through all that hassle just to get the nice screensavers working? I could tell you becaues it’s nice to have 3D support just in case, I could tell you to get security fixes for any flaws that might have been discovered in the 2.6.15.2 and I could tell you that hibernation is now a lot faster. But the real reason I think is:
Because I can
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