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[RFC] Consider removal of some PKGBUILD options

Open ventureoo opened this issue 1 year ago • 9 comments

I think the fact that we provide a lot of options to customize the kernel build right in PKGBUILD is great, but some of them (in my opinion) are pretty useless and 98% of the time are not used in any way and just distract user. For example:

  • _NUMAdisable - as stated in the comment, it makes no sense from a performance standpoint to disable NUMA these days. Many workloads require NUMA, in the past disabling NUMA has also caused issues with CUDA. Some custom kernels like linux-lqx have already dropped this option: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=linux-lqx&id=bf16ff7f8d2d70bc95e962e0865363411b7a61c8. So I don't see the point of keeping it for our PKGBUILDs. If someone actually wants to do this, they can always do it via nconfig.

  • _hugepage - I don't remember us ever changing default THP mode other than always. First, it doesn't make sense because always has good performance for desktop workloads, second it can always be changed at runtime. So changing it at compile time seems pointless to me.

  • _per_gov- We have long since abandoned the use of a performance governor by default, and just as with _hugepage this can be always changed in runtime and in CachyOS we provide all tools to do so as a PPD/game-performance script.

  • _cc_harder - We and pretty much all other kernels except stock have been using O3 by default for years and haven't seen any major regressions. There are many tests here confirming performance gains in a number of cases. So I have no idea why someone might want to turn O3 off, but as before, if someone wants to do it - they can do it via nconfig.

  • _makexconfig / _makemenuconfig - Too many configurators for the kernel. I haven't seen anyone using _makexconfig instead of _makegconfig yet, because obviously I have no idea what pros of that are, and besides it's not supported on purely Wayland environments. Also _makemenuconfig looks a bit pointless to me in the presence of nconfig, which looks more tidy and understandable.

Removing the options above will make PKGBUILD a little cleaner and clearer for the user. There are a few other options that I find questionable, but in general I would like to discuss only those mentioned above.

ventureoo avatar Dec 26 '24 19:12 ventureoo