Do you want to remove bloat from your Linux installation? Are you looking to enable extra features that aren't provided by your distro? Fancy trying some of the cutting-edge patches doing the rounds? You'll need to recompile your kernel.

You don't need a PhD in computer science and years of experience to hack the kernel. We asked prolific kernel hacker (and Linux Format reader!) Greg Kroah-Hartman to tell us what it takes for newbies to patch the Linux kernel - here's what he had to say...

With the Linux 2.6.34 kernel development cycle getting into swing, we have decided to provide a historical look at the Linux kernel performance, we have ran some fresh benchmarks going back to the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and ending with the recently released Linux 2.6.33 kernel.

Now that Linus Torvalds is done rewiring part of his house, he has put out the Linux 2.6.33 kernel release. This update to the Linux kernel that's coming three months after the release of Linux 2.6.32 delivers the Nouveau DRM GPU code in the staging area, many Radeon KMS improvements and it has left the staging area, the new VMware DRM, and much more.

Researchers at the University of Oviedo in Spain have estimated that the cost of replicating the development embodied in the Linux kernel at over €1bn.

I lost count of the number of times someone told me I was nuts for wanting to compile a new kernel Why not get a new different distro of Linux that works on a specific machine? What is wrong with the kernel that comes with the distro? There are reasons for compiling a new kernel.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer, and head of the Linux Drivers Project. He is a Novell Fellow, and works on the SUSE distribution for that company. At the Linux Foundation, Kroah-Hartman has helped to compile the “Who Writes Linux?” survey for the past few years.

The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual.