It would be nice to have a kernel that has been optimized to use in emulated x86 environments such as virtual pc or vmware. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
What exactly do you mean by "optimized" ? ... As for emulated environments, the best solution is usually just to optimize it like a real kernel, e.g. use the right C compiler optimizations [ most virtual machines emulate the host CPU instruction set ] and to remove everything you don't need such as IDE controller drivers for anything but the emulated controller causing less kernel bloat. And enable-preemptive-scheduling.
By optimized, it would be great to have either a pre-defined kernel that is already 'menuconfiged' to be optimal for virtual systems, probally it would make sense to have a vmware and virtualpc version, just having a script that can run against one of the default kernels would make sense. The reason this would be nice is that in my case for example, I am constantly testing scenarios and i find I always have to go though the exercise to manually configure so that it runs well in the test environments (vms), by having a script that could be run lets say like emerge gentoo-sources emerge genkernel genkernel --config --vmware or genkernel --virtualpc rather than having to go through the myrid of options you now can quickly get a copy of gentoo running in a vm and then perform the testing as needed. -- does that make sense?
Daniel, perhaps we can add some preconfigured .config's to genkernel and add a "--forvm" flag?
Are we giong to add a default config for genkernel for virtual machines? Has anyone else toyed with this idea?
I think we should leave the configs as they are. They are a controversial topic, but they are chosen a certain way for a reason.
