Optimization for Athlon CPUs ??

NewbieTim · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 57

Hi,

does the optimization also affect Athlon CPUs or is a feature to turn on optimization for Athlon CPUs ??
And btw...how do i remove my existing Suse the best way to prepare my system for a Gentoo install??

freefall · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2002 Posts: 89

You can choose level of optimization in /etc/make.conf. There are several examples there, just uncomment the optimization you want. The file is easy to understand.

I would just backup what I want to keep from the Suse install and boot with the Gentoo cd. You can wipe out the Suse install with fdisk during installation.

Guest · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 6:58 pm Post subject:

newbie,

Yes the optimizations effect the Athlon CPU's, but there are no Ahtlon ONLY optimizations... if you are hunting for the wholey-grail of optimizations, I'd encourage you to do what freefall said and just uncomment the optimization lines in the /etc/make.profiles/make.defaults file (etc/make.conf is a deprecated way to change the settings).

I know you'll see people on this forum with stuff like:
-funroll -fblah blah blah -f blhasdkjlq2kjasd

and lots of other optmizations, trust me, the ones in that config file (-03 -march=i686 -pipe) are more than enough, the -03 turns on an ungodly amount of optimizations as is. Also, turning on loop unrolling and frame pointer opts make the compiles take considerably longer and don't provide any noticable performance (that I could tell on my Athlon XP 2000+)

As far as backing up Suse... if you just need to save some configs and files and stuff, try and dump them on disk or my favorite, an FTP site, otherwise I can't help. I always just cream my data when I install a new OS (since I burn it to CD).

rsk · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:24 pm Post subject:

I was wrong about that whole /etc/make.conf thing

clarification:
/etc/make.profile/make.defaults has all the default settings, DON'T EDIT THIS

/etc/make.conf is where you enter values that can OVERRIDE values from make.defaults via the "-" operator...

For example, in make.defaults, there is "gnome" in the use line, I don't use gnome, so in my make.conf on the USE="" line I added -gnome so it looks like:

USE="-gnome"

now gnome support isn't autocraptastically compiled into things.

rsk · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:24 pm Post subject:

oh yea... the "guest" reply 2 posts up was me... that is what I ment when I said "I was wrong"

NewbieTim · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 57

Backing up the data of my Suse isn't the problem...i just want to know if i should delete everything/fdisk everything..etc...

rsk · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:33 pm Post subject:

oh yea.. you should. I suggest using XFS as the file system, its impressively fast (also use metalog as your logger, smallest overhead, unless you care a lot about logging).

Make it clean!

it honestly only takes about a minute to mkfs a 40gig drive, I did it twice yesterday.

NewbieTim · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 57

And should (or can) I fdisk the partition during the installation or doesnt that matter...?? I just quickly went through the installation guide so sorry for my lame questions..

rsk · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:44 pm Post subject:

no prob... print the guide out, its really good.

when you boot from the cd (burn the huge iso, 130meg so you can boot from it, but USE stage1 off of the cd, so you can compile EVEYRTHING)

and yes, just read through the document from step 1 - 12871283974123 (not really that long), but it holds your hand perfectly. I did this install for the first time 3 days ago, and have done it 4 times already (I'm fighting with my nForce board, but got it working just fine with the nVidia drivers and the correct kenerl config).

freefall · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2002 Posts: 89

rsk · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 8:04 pm Post subject:

oh I didn't know the small one was bootable, thx!

hyperstation · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 11 Location: montana, usa

...i think GCC 3 has athlon specific optimizations (someone who knows can verify that maybe?)

Guest · Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 12:35 am Post subject: Re: gcc 3

Guest · Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 4:01 am Post subject: gentoo, gcc3, and athlons

I got this to work with the -march=athlon in make.conf but to get it to work I had to use -march=i686 to bootstrap gcc3 since gcc 2 doesn't understand that flag. I changed the flag after doing the bootstrap.sh so I probably didn't get all the optimizations but my system's been very happy and stable for the past couple of weeks. 'Course, I run a real window environment: WindowMaker.

TeraTorn · Guest

I read an article that benchmarked GCC 3 against 2.95.3 on an Athlon, GCC SUCKS HARD on an Athlong due to some Pentium optimizations... Sorry, youll have to google the article yourself... also last time I tried, GCC 3 build a broken kernel, so I'm just sticking with good old 2.95.3 for now...

Guest · Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 2:36 pm Post subject: Re: Athlon + GCC 3.0