Back when I was still using Gentoo, configuring your own kernel was a rite of passage. It was kind of fun to try and configure it as minimalist as possible to cut down on the kernel compile time. Also, understanding all the different options and possibilities. And thanks to use flags, you had access to all these different patch sets for the kernel, which took a lot of the pain out of trying things like experimental schedulers or filesystems.

Not for myself but a client who was running a game server. He wanted to tweak the number of ticks/second that the kernel interacted with CPU. Didn’t even know that this was a parameter and after a few attempts, according to him, never went on that server myself, made a huge difference and he claimed having grabbed a good part of the market because of that.

After that familiarized myself more with the stuff in there. But that was a good while ago, before most of you guys were born.

I do it because I can… I read release notes on every update and once you’ve configured a kernel for a particular machine you really don’t need to touch the config, barring major changes like when PATA and SATA merged. Or of course if I’m adding a new piece of hardware.

I remove everything I don’t need and compiling the kernel only takes a couple minutes. I use Gentoo and approach everything on my system the same way - remove the things I don’t need to make it as minimal as possible.

Compiling your own kernel also makes it easier when you need to do a git bisect to determine when a bug was introduced to report it or try to fix it. I’ve also included kernel patches in my build years ago, but haven’t needed to do that in a long time.

I used to compile a custom kernel for my phone to enable modules/drivers that weren’t included by default by the maintainer.

It’s not about performance for me, it’s about control.

Bragging rights.

Filesystem level encryption enabled on RHEL. For some damn reason, they turn it off in their kernel.

A wee bit of knowledge and the wisdom to stop doing it.

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Knowledge and time forced to not be on the computer

I’m running a custom kernel on my Arch laptop. It’s a little faster, a little smaller and a little quite more secure. I’m also running custom kernel which enables adiantum encryption on old phone with postmarketOS.

I run linux-xanmod-anbox for root support in Waydroid (Android on Linux).

And I configured my kernel to support VFIO (Virtual Function Input Output).
So I can fully pass through one of my GPUs to my Ameliorated Windows KVM,
which I use for both work and gaming.