Boosting your Kernel on Gentoo

Everybody knows that Gentoo is a performance-architeture-oriented Linux. You can optimize your entire system changing the compiler (gcc) flags to attend the hardware specificities.

Example: I have a Sony VAIO with Intel Core 2 Duo processor, then I can use this flags on my make.conf (I unmasked sys-devel/gcc to use gcc-4.3.3 that have native support to core2 technology)

CFLAGS="-O3 -march=core2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -mssse3"

Then, all binaries in your system will be optimized…but and the kernel ???

Well, when you compile the kernel it uses itself compiler flags. And how to optimize it ?

Good news to you…If you have a Intel processor and use Gentoo Linux in your machine you are a lucky man. You must know the LinuxDNA project. The idea of the project is optimize the kernel to Intel architecture using the icc (Intel Compiler).

Currently, I’m working on Gentoo ebuild to linuxdna package. You’ll have more news about it soon…

Setting keyboard on XWindow

It’s a little tip showing how you can change your keyboard layout on X11 when you are not root and you cannot use the console (when you are able to use the console, you can use yourself X11 config file through the startx command).

Well, forget KDE, GNOME and modern X11 clients. Think you are using a simple client as Fluxbox and OpenBox…How do you can change your keyboard layout ?

It’s simple…use setxkbmap. In my case (I have a Sony Vaio with Spanish layout):

setxkbmap es

My two cents