⚡ Iodine Kernel

Lean and simple performance oriented build of the Linux kernel.

Every change aims to maintain - or, possibly, optimize - the power usage-to-performance ratio.

Features

• Kernel compression mode LZ4
• BMQ Process Scheduler
• BFQ I/O Scheduler
• Swap Pages LZ4/z3fold
• Westwood+ TCP Congestion Control + FQ_CODEL Queue Scheduler
• Disabled several hardening and debugging options
• Low swappiness value
• GCC optimization -O3, graysky2's patch
• LLVM/Clang build facility

Releases

Compiled and packaged on Debian Buster using GCC 10.2.0

Build

Optionally, before jumping to the actual build, you may wish to edit the build.sh to set your personal configs under Configurations.

To build a DEB package (you could omit --deb as it's the default option), use:

./build.sh --deb --build

for a RPM package, use:

./build.sh --rpm --build

Append --generic to build a generic kernel.

Complete usage ./build.sh -h:

  -h, --help
  Print these options

  -g, --get-kernel
  Clone the Linux repository only

  -p, --apply-patches
  Apply patches only

  -c, --set-config
  Generate the kernel config with the selected options

  -b, --build
  Run over all the commands to build the kernel

  --llvm
  Use LLVM

  --deb, --rpm
  Package to either DEB or RPM

  --generic
  Optimize for generic x86_64 CPUs

  --sign-modules
  Signing facility

To sign the modules, proceed to update the option in the build.sh file to IODINE_SIGNING="y" and use IODINE_SIGNING_KEY to assign the signing key path.

Requirements

Since the kernel is compressed using LZ4, be sure to have it installed!

$ sudo apt install lz4

For a faster, less safe, experience you could disable the security mitigations editing the GRUB default (/etc/default/grub), appending mitigations=off to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT option:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet mitigations=off"