Key Notes

When should one consider recompiling the Linux kernel?

In general the kernel that comes on the distribution CD is good enough for most purposes. But there are certain situations where compiling a new kernel becomes necessary. Some of these include:

1. New device support: If support for a particular device is not compiled in the kernel on the distribution CD, it may be necessary to recompile the kernel with the driver of the new device.

2. If you have an older version of the kernel through your distribution, you may be able to get some new features by compiling a new kernel from fresh kernel sources (from kernel.org)

3. You may consider compiling the kernel if you have newer hardware, and more performance could be extracted by compiling the kernel for the new architecture. You may also get additional performance by compiling support for a feature (say a particular network card) within the kernel, instead of compiling it as a separate module.

4. You may find a bug in your current kernel. So, you will either patch the current kernel source and compile it or get sources for a newer kernel version (with the bug fixed) and compile the newer version.