Re: [gentoo-dev] "Distro Day (Measuring the benefits of the Gentoo approach)"

[FRLinux]

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 23:49, William Kenworthy wrote:
> I posted this to the gentoo-user list by mistake last night (it was
> after midnight and ...) - wondered why I didnt get too many
> flames/replies!

Glad to know you were actually 'one of us' as in, you took time to get
information on what should be set on the Gentoo make.conf file.

> 3. optimisations were EXACTLY as recommended by both the make.conf
> entries, which were supported by the cflags from the forum for this cpu:
> a 2G celery (P4 based core)  I am not sure now, but I believe I ran
> prelink as well (to match mandrake) - need to find and check the notes.

Having read a couple of posts before yours, i'm quite scared to learn
that prelink could lead to an unstable system. I've never emerged it on
my gentoo and was considering doing so, anyone could enlighten me on the
possible risks on this ? I am looking at more stability over speed
improvements and have been very satisfied with my 1.4rc3 install so far.


> So how many gentoo systems out there have every possible optimisation in
> the book, and are actually running slower than ideal?  This is a real
> problem, and I will be interested in how the cflags projects around
> handle this, as most seem to aim at setting the maximum possible flags:
> not actually tune the system for the ones that work best/most stably.  A
> live benchmark test might be more appropriate.

CFLAGS are the key-point to my knowledge, i am not a compiler specialist
but i don't even put specific optimisations anymore on my Gentoo, just
keep -march=athlon-xp -03 and that is all.
 
> Most posts on irc and lists have settled down to "he doesnt know what
> he's doing" (I do), or the tests were unfair to gentoo (they werent, but
> then the same criteria were met by all 3 systems, but with some question
> marks over debian because of its mix - some packages had to be compiled
> locally, not binary) - but the thrust of the article was not that gentoo
> was a dud, but that this was the result within the criteria and time we
> were given, not what we expected, so we need to find out why.  Also note
> that this was not intentionally a debian/mandrake/gentto distro test.

Well you have to admit that reading the test doesn't give a lot of
informations about what was done ... This is where people begun picking
on you. If that had been a bit more detailed, the feedback would have
been better i'm sure, exactly as you have currently done with your post.

> If you want to flame, go ahead - but support your statements!

No flame concerning myself, i'm glad to have a better understanding of
what was done. Plus you are not the first one mentioning that Gentoo
depending on its optimisations (read my words on this : depending) is
slower than Mandrake for instance (which has done quite a nice job
lately on speed).

Steph
-- 
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