Hello all I am a linux veteran to some degree and I was an avid Linux Mandrake user way back when before they became Mandriva and I do like the direction that OpenMandriva has taken. I’ve been combing through this distro and thoroughly examining it to everything from stock cpu optimizations and compiler flags to how to further anonymize systemd while coming up with other ways to enhance real time audio performance, raise the gpu priority and nice levels, as well as tweaking kwin’s flags to make it more responsive, as well as zram optimizations and sysctl kernel optimizations for swappiness, the fs read / write and many other things, and with good results.
I am looking into the notion now of what would happen if a script existed which downloaded the OpenMandriva desktop kernel source as well as all depends, and then git cloned the Xanmod patches to build a custom kernel which is CLANG / LLVM just like OpenMandriva’s but with more optimizations for responsivenes and speed. For one the Xanmod kernel supports v2 and v3 out of the box by default and instead of using 1000hz ticks with preempt it uses 250hz but has its own custom timers which are faster than the default stock timers. I’ve compare this in Debian against liquorix before I left Debian and Xanmod was much more responsive. Why 250hz though ? Well, it does not ping the kernel every 1ms and bog it the cpu down as bad and the timers are more efficient. Instead it uses every 4ms to eliminate any bottlenecks providing a smoother response and smoother operation.
The takeaway here is that OpenMandriva is already built with CLANG / LLVM and the core libs have v2 and v3 compiled in. If your cpu has AVX and AVX2 ( and most do nowadays if they are 13 years old or newer ) then your cpu will support v2, v3, or posisbly v4 which Xanmod enables by default. My idea was to come up with a potental script which patches this in from git and builds the kernel, and then patches the latest CVE patches while using the OpenMandriva Kernel as the base source but adding in the other patches to enhance it. I do not think this should be stock but should be in a 3rd party repo option that can be checked and enabled or disabled as an option and should have prompts in the script to create a self updating cron job where the end user can choose how often they want it to check for updates for Xanmod and security patches.
It seems viable that for ROCK a LTS kernel base would be used and for ROME potentially the 7.x base by default but perhaps this could be a prompt in said script which asks which version and offers a choice based off of LTS or newer bleeding edge 7.x ?
These are just some ideas I had and wanted to offer the suggestion as many distros such as RHEL and Fedora. CachyOS already builds all of their packages with v2 and v3 baked in btw and propeller so they are already optimized. Perhaps that is even a future option for OpenMandriva as well ?
While OpenMandriva is already great, I did do the research earlier today and concluded that OpenMandriva with a Xanmod patched kernel and with prebuild v2 and v3 packages which are optimized would absolutely blow the doors off of Debian and many other distros potentially even CachyOS because their distro is not also built in CLANG / LLVM. This seems like the next logical optimization step for performance and for people who demand more out of their systems.
I can vouch that I did use Xanmod in Debian and in Devuan and loved Xanmod. The OpenMandriva kernel is already great but this would optimize it yet even further. I will also be looking into SELinux optimizations a bit more for kernel hardening. In Devuan I had Tomoyo, SELinux, and AppArmor all playing nice and working together perfectly but I realize that you really only need SELinux ( which OpenMandriva has already in audit / complain mode ) and SELinux is better than AppArmor in my honest opinion.
Here is an example snippet for the code idea I was looking into earlier regarding the script to compile Xanmod from git into the OpenMandriva kernel source as a 3rd party option.
[ #!/bin/bashset -e# --- Pre-flight: detect AND fix ---# CPU levelif g - Pastebin.com ]
You may or may not like the idea but the saying is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and so if nobody says anything it isn’t likely to happen and nothing will get done and so I am offering the idea here if anyone wants to look into it. I may mess with it on my own system but I will have to do more research.
This idea may or may not be well received but I thought it worth offering.
However, we do backport security fixes to the standard kernel in ROCK and would not be pushing out those backported fixes to the non-standard LTS kernel.
