Well, OK, I'm not really Steve, but I did recompile my 2.6.27 Linux kernel this weekend.  That should count for something

Long ago back in the prehistoric days of Linux... say... around 10 years ago, I used to recompile my kernels on a regular basis.  Ha, it was almost mandatory just to get sound working back then since the default kernel with most Linux distributions didn't have that part of the kernel working either as part of the kernel or as a kernel module.... at least on my computer hardware at the time

Since then though... I've become lazy... or is it my comfortable rut haunting me again?  Whatever it is, I haven't rebuilt my Linux kernels for years... I've just used whatever was shipped with the Linux distribution I happened to install.  Funny thing is... it wasn't hard to do at all.  A quick reminder on the Wiki page about building kernels... a few short command line steps, a nice menu editor for the kernel options I wanted to enable, and an hour later I was running on my own custom kernel.

Why though did I do this?  Why did I make an attempt at being Steve?  Well... you see, I'm an avid gamer (yes Virginia, there are games in Linux), and on the latest openSUSE release, game performance took a real dive.  After lots of digging and asking questions, it came down to a couple of options that I needed to change in the default openSUSE kernel.. specifically  setting the Preemption Model to Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop) (this is set to off in the openSUSE kernel shipped with openSUSE 11.1) and Timer frequency to 1000Hz (this is set to 300Hz in the openSUSE kernel shipped with openSUSE 11.1).

Was it worth it?  Well... in a word YES.  I ran a test on the default kernel - a timedemo in Call of Duty 4 running in Cedega 7.0.0 with all graphics options on max including AA on 4x.  I booted to the new kernel and ran the same timedemo with the same settings... and saw a 37% increase in frame rates.  That is a pretty substantial improvement between the default kernel and my rebuilt one.

Does this make me a Steve?  Naah.. probably not... I mean, there were no cyber goats or fembots involved at any stage of the process.

PS, in case you were wondering what the heck I'm talking about with this Steve thing and cybergoats... take a look here: http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54