I did this twice now, although the first couple of builds seemed to work ok, they just weren't configured quite right. On my third and fourth builds of the 42.0.8 kernel rpm, when booting, kudzu came up and ran, but the keyboard was somehow not recognized and I had to reboot using the mouse on the login screen (no text appears no matter what I type). I'm using the rpm build strategy from Jim's wiki, which works nicely, but my fallback is a 42.0.3 non-smp kernel. My main question, though, is how did this happen? Is there a config switch or something else I missed? I'm using the base kernel-2.6.9-x86_64-smp.config, and tweaking it to include ext3 and xfs in the kernel (instead of loadable ext3 and no xfs). Why? Well, we need xfs to load so we can find out why it's so damned slow on cached vs. direct i/o. We have some tweaks we put into xfs (current version, using SuSE Linux 9.something) in order to be able to control the way the extents are allocated. We need to be able to do large i/os in large chunks quickly, and that kind of allocation works better than little pieces all over the place. (We're looking at 8Mb chunks and larger.) With direct i/o, we can get around 30-40Mb/s transfer rates, but with cached (i.e., kernel) i/o, we are stuck at 8, which is too slow. It turns out we get better performance from jfs, but we want to use xfs because it is faster with our changes. The main issue here, though, is the failure of CentOS 2.6.9-42.0.8 to recognize the keyboard - why would that happen? Thanks. mhr