# custom kernel?

## zojas

I became a gentoo user saturday night, and so far i'm having a ball. 

how can i find out what patches are in the gentoo kernel? is it a 2.4.18 kernel with patches, or is it a 2.4.19-preX with some patches?

also, if i decide to put my own kernel on, do i just have to make sure i have tmpfs and devfs in the kernel, or is there more to it than that?

the reason I'm worried about it: if i run an emerge, xmms, and another cpu intensive program, like gqview generating thumbnails, or xscreensaver-demo, the system slows to a crawl, the mouse gets all jerky. so i was thinking of putting the newest mainline kernel with the preemptive kernel patch on. I have a 700MHz athlon with 896 mb ram, so the load should not be an interactive problem.

thanks

----------

## zojas

I installed linux-2.4.19-pre2 and applied the preemptive kernel patch. this kernel works great: it fixed the user responsiveness issues, gtv and xine now play mpegs great (they locked up the X server using the gentoo kernels)

the only downside is GL is a bit slower. oh well

----------

## Malakin

Open these files in a text editor and you'll see there's a brief comment at the top that describes what's in the kernel.

/usr/portage/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources/gentoo-sources-2.4.19.ebuild

This should be the current default kernel, the description appears to be wrong though :) Anyways that's where you should be able to identify what's in the kernel.

----------

