# why should I upgrade my kernel

## rikell42

I am running kernel 2.6.7

I know that this is some what out of date and that I could spend a weekend figuring out how to upgrade it with out losing all the tweeking I did to it when I first installed gentoo some months ago. 

is there really any reason to upgrade?

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## teknomage1

unless there's a security advisory or a new feature you want you never have to upgrade. So if you're not feeling it, don't sweat it.

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## dontremember

 *teknomage1 wrote:*   

> unless there's a security advisory or a new feature you want you never have to upgrade. So if you're not feeling it, don't sweat it.

 

Second that.  I'm running with 2.6.10-gentoo-r7 right now, because all the 2.6.11 kernels I've tried seem to have an annoying stutter.  Near as I can tell, about every 5 seconds, cpu usage goes to 100% for no readily apparent reason.  If I'm typing, no text is echoed back for a short time.  If I'm moving the mouse, the pointer stops dead, then jumps to where it would have reached.

The only thing that changes is the kernel - same apps running, same boot sequence, same hardware...  I've built 2.6.11-gentoo-r1 -> r8 and they all do the same.  Every time, I copy over the .config from 2.6.10-gentoo-r7 and run "make oldconfig", answering No to all the new stuff.  Vanilla-sources also does the same, so I'm not blaming any of the gentoo-sources patches...   :Smile: 

So, yeah, if that kernel works for you, keep it.  I'm just trying out the new ones because I have a couple of bits of hardware that show up as "Unknown device".

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## Rad

Well there are performance and hardware support related improvements besides security fixes... 

And it won't hurt to try a new kernel; even if there's no problems at all. Just keep the old kernel, and If the new one doesn't work, you just boot that one again.

If by "tweaks" you meant settings rather than patches: Well, upgrading without loosing settings is not much work. You just copy .config from the old kerneldir to the new one, issue "make oldconfig" in the new kerneldir to decide about the new kernel options and then proceed with installation as usual; except that you can skip further configuration if you don't want to do that. Meaning you can just compile and copy System.map & bzImage to /boot afterwards.

If, however, "tweaks" meant special patches, you can try looking at the unsupported software forum to see wheter anybody already made a good patchset or write some "epatch" lines into some official ebuild you copied into your overlaydir (which should make upgrades easier from when it's done).

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## boogerman

If I remember right there was a huge security hole in the 2.4 kernel that was fixed in the 2.4.25 release, and the release of the 2.6.5 had a huge speed increase, didn't it?

Basically there are four reasons to upgrade your kernel:

1 support for new devices

2 speed

3 security

4 fun

Of course the orders of importance are different for different people according to their needs (mine is 4123, yes, 4 being first).

Pretty much, I upgrade my kernel whenever there is something I want to try doing with the kernel and there is a new release. I'm currently up to 2.6.11-r9, as I did a project yesterday. Anyway, that's my speach on the whole thing.

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## nevynxxx

Just for future reference. To make the tweeking less of a hassle, when you configure your kernel, make sure the option "store config in /proc" (or something like that, I'm not sure of the exact option) is selected.

This means that you can then, download, unpack your kernel. Then run 

```
zcat /proc/config.gz > /usr/src/linux/.config
```

Then when you make menuconfig, all the options you selected last time are already selected.

Saves some time.[/code]

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