The kind of geek I am not

[andrewducker]

is personified in this (hopefully satirical) comment

"As a Gentoo user what really stands out to me is that this test was clearly biased away from Linux. If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could. It really saddens me to see that people go out of their way to spend so much money on such expensive hardware and then squander their investment by running barely suitable software on it. To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code. Even if I do occasionally get my CFLAGS in a muddle! I think I speak for Slashdot when I say that Gentoo is the only sane option for getting the most from your hardware!"

Cheers to azalemeth for the link to http://www.funroll-loops.org/.

Comments

[figg.livejournal.com]

The fun part is that -O3 is often slower than -O2. (In gcc 2.x anyway (iirc from some mailing list posting))

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

Personally, the only things that actually make a difference are getting the march and mcpu set up correctly - although that may be because I'm x86-64 (amd64), and don't like being chunked in with the x86 crowd. J2 helps a little, O2 a moderate amount. I've never tried O3, but at that point I'd guess you'd be better off freeing the mallocs...

The main reason I use gentoo at home is because portage does rock. It's stupidly customisable. I like my useflags, and everything else built for my 64-bit system. And etc-update (whereby any and all changes to your configuration files that result from updates are shown, giving you choices what to do with them - as well as protecting them from getting nuked) is really cool too :).

This picture (http://www.funroll-loops.org/computer.jpg), however, does take the biscuit somewhat...

[figg.livejournal.com]

Aside: Gentoo got a reputation for speed, originally. It was the first vendor to ship kernels with the jiffes set to 1024 (Timer interupt frequency, normally set to 10 or so). Along with other non standard patches, it gave for a more interactive kernel. Most of this went into 2.6 mainline though, so it doesn't matter much now.

Also: Gentoo is one of the first linux distributions to use dependancy based init instead of the abortion that is SysV. (Mastodon linux, was the first) - this is nice.

etc-update isn't unique. In debian, I get asked which config file I want to keep on update.
Bar the lack of dependancy based init, I get the same flexibility from apt-get and debian that I need. I only install the packages I want. apt sorts out the dependancies. I generally compile the kernel and ffmpeg for my architecture.

Being able to pick a compiler is nice for the system. I imagine using icc would give a significant speedup. gcc+propolice would be useful for stack protection.

And if people want to use a distribution for learning linux they should use slackware :)

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

When the architecture is new - as amd64 was when I bought it - I found that gentoo was the first (working) base system to put. But that's just my experience - take it with a lump 'o rock-salt the size of Canada. Gentoo is a *lot* faster than other alternatives, and I really do notice the speed; In comparison to a 32-bit-system, at least. Dependancies in portage are wonderful; emerge packagename just *works*; emerge -u world just *works*, and `USE="-debug -mysql" emerge dev-lang/php` works fine too. Such are the joys of modern packagemanagement in comparison to "Error! Libfoo requires libbar!" from el-olden-days.

My "first ever" linux box was slack, which I then put the portage port over. I've still got its P2-233 goodyness somewhere :). Over a 56k, fun it was not....