[GRLUG] FOR SALE - 16-Cores, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB, RAID, 2xFX4500 Graphics

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Adam Tauno
Williams<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 00:20 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
>> OK.  I've never used Gentoo, but
>> thought one of the motivations for
>> doing so was that you compiled it
>> for your specific processor, and got
>> some kind of performance bump.
>
> Maybe, but anyone who believes that is just crazy or very uninformed.
> People run Gentoo because, for whatever reason legitimate or not, they
> want to compile everything themselves.

Control is a nice feature of it.  Control is also one of the reasons I
run Linux in the first place.  I suspect that's true of a lot of the
people on this list.

A common example is needing support that the package maintainers
disabled for patent reasons.

>
>> I do use Ubuntu, and upgrades of one
>> sort or another come along regularly.
>> But the packages are generic, and all
>> one sees is "i386" or some kind of 64-bit
>> package, and doesn't get whatever
>> optimization might occur by compiling
>> for your exact CPU.
>
> Right, other binary distros work the same.  And for 99.44% (maybe
> 99.99%) of all software compiling for a specific CPU makes no difference
> at all, certainly not a noticeable one.  In practice people who don't
> understand what the compiler options *actually* mean have no business
> messing with them and frequently generate software that is broken in
> myriad subtle ways.  I've often wondered if I created a church of "The
> Mighty -O3" if I could get rich from the tithes of Gentoo users who
> believe that compiling everything with the gcc -O3 option makes their
> i386sx16 run like a quad-core Xeon.  Note: I'm not implying Mr. Mol is a
> member of that cult of loonies, he knows plenty about compilers [I'd
> guess more than me] and I'm certain has chosen Gentoo for his own
> reasons.

Heh.  Actually, the regulars in #gentoo on FreeNode (and the folks who
maintain the Gentoo docs wiki) seem fairly sane.  Even they
acknowledge there's a cult of loonies out there. :)

>
>> That I can see, if one wants more
>> performance, buy higher performance
>> hardware.
>
> Yep.  The cliche about blood from a turnip applies.

Unless you have compile-time option requirements for the software that
a binary-distributed build doesn't cover, there's absolutely no point
in compiling a package for a CPU that doesn't have features that the
traditional build would have taken advantage of.

-- 
:wq