[gentoo-amd64] Requesting advice on PIC and amd64

[Bob Young]

I’m re-installing Gentoo64 yet-again on my dual Opteron box, this time I
want to build with nptl and nptlonly use flags starting from stage1. ( <- I’
d welcome thoughts/opinions on this as well).

In deciding on what other use flags I want, I noticed the pic flag, with it’
s accompanying warning of “Do not utilize this flag unless you know what
you're doing.” So I figured I’d better do some research. I’ve read
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/pic-guide.xml and
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/pic-internals.xml. It seems that
using PIC is primarily a security feature/enhancement. The box is a
workstation, and has no public IP address, I’m more interested in
performance than security, but if the PIC adds significant security without
noticeably impacting performance on amd64, I’m wondering if adding the pic
use flag in make.conf might be a good idea.

TIA
Bob Young
San Jose CA.