Turning Mitigations off

The mitigations parameter refers to some mitigations built into the kernel to address the Spectre [2] and Meltdown [3] CPU vulnerabilities. Switching all optional CPU mitigations off can improve CPU performance, but be aware of the security risks. Don't use this option if you are concerned about security. You should only consider turning off mitigations if your Linux system is not on any network or if you are certain that your CPU is not affected by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

nowatchdog

A watchdog timer is a tiny utility that is used to detect and recover from computer malfunctions. Specifically, it can perform a power reset for various hardware to maintain operations without manual intervention. See if your system is using a watchdog timer with the following command:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog

1 means the timer is on;   means it is off.

This kind of hardware monitoring is good for mission-critical servers and unattended embedded devices, but definitely not desktops or laptops. Therefore it is a good idea to disable the watchdog timer completely by appending the nowatchdog boot parameter.

Benefits of Recompiling

Sooner or later, you might want to go deeper and make more solid changes by recompiling the Linux kernel. One benefit of recompiling is that you can banish all unneeded hardware support and get a smaller kernel. There are dozens of historic, legacy, and exotic hardware items that the kernel still supports even though the majority of desktop or laptop users will have no need for this support. A smaller kernel means a smaller disk and memory footprint, which can improve performance.

Second, you can rearrange the kernel drivers by removing them from the monolithic part of the system (bzImage, aka vmlinuz) and adding them to the modular part (root fs, aka initrd – see Figure 2). Making the monolithic part smaller was a good practice in the past, and it is still important these days for systems with no more than 2GB of RAM. Also, changing drivers from the statically compiled kernel to modules greatly improves the resume time after hibernation or suspension. This explains why an average Linux system takes much longer to wake up than macOS with its microkernel.

Figure 2: Use the lsinitrd command to determine which kernel modules are part of initramfs, the tiny filesystem that loads entirely into RAM upon the Linux system boot up.

Third, the Linux kernel already includes settings for better desktop performance, but they are not enabled by default. Customizing the kernel configuration lets you enable full preemption, pick higher timer frequency, define a CPU family, enable zstd compression, and more.

Fourth, you can patch the kernel with third-party patch sets to achieve many performance-related enhancements at once. As you will learn later in this article, projects like XanMod [4] and Liquorix [5] maintain custom kernels that are tuned to optimize performance for specific scenarios in case you don't want to meddle with every kernel setting by hand.