Kernel Selection in Mandriva 2009

I just found my first problem with Mandriva - not a show-stopper by any means, but I feel it’s post worthy as I’m sure it’s affecting many x86_64 users out there (not sure about i586-i686 users).

By default, Mandriva installed both the “Server” and the “Desktop” kernels on my machine, and was booting the “Server” kernel by default.

If you are running Mandriva x86_64, open up a terminal real quick and execute the following command:
uname -a
If you see “server” in there this affects you. If it does, I recommend uninstalling the “Server” kernel and running off of the Desktop kernel.

The biggest differences (from what I gathered scaning the configs really quickly):

Desktop has

• CONFIG_NO_HZ=y (which I disable by adding “nohz=off” to my grub for better VM performance - you may want to keep it enabled for better power management and battery life on a notebook)
• CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y (where the server kernel has CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE set to “y”)
• CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
• CONFIG_HZ=1000

I’m sure there are more differences, but these are what I checked, as they are what I mostly expected to be different…I didn’t read the entire files .

Let me also say that this didn’t turn me off to Mandriva one bit, although I’m not sure why the installer did this - could be a bug, could be intentional. I’m gonna check to see if a bug has been filed, and if not, I’m going to file one to see what response I get.

Also, if anything it strengthened my opinion of Mandriva considering how well it was running w/ less than an ideal Kernel config (it even snappier now, if that was possible!).