question on optimizations + speed....

bob_t

Hope this is the right place for this...apologies if not.

I'm really intrigued with Gentoo, and I'm pretty sure that I'll install in on my desktop machine in place of SuSE 7.3, which I'm tired of, largely for issues of bloat. I also have Debian installed on my laptop, and I like that quite a bit, but Gentoo seems excellent for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the emerge function and the possibility of cpu-specific optimizations.

My question is, in your opinion, do you think that compiling specifically for each processor makes a big difference? I've heard anecdotally that people's gentoo machines "feel" faster..is that the case for the gentoo users here who've used other distros? Of course, some folks over on debian planet claim that it makes almost no real difference. What do you think? In your opinion, what else make Gentoo so wonderful (if you've been running it)?

In all likelihood, I'll give Gentoo a shot instead of Debian for my desktop machine. I'm just curious to hear other people's experiences....

TIA...bob

c_kuzmanic · Guest

Hi Bob,

I've used linux professionally and at home for just about over 6 years. I'm familiar with all major distributions and have used Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse and Debian extensively. I ran across Gentoo some five months ago, got curious and installed it under vmware on my Desktop which was running Debian at the time. After playing with Gentoo, it took me only about 2 hours to decide to get rid of my trusted Debian installation and install Gentoo as my prime Linux OS.

In terms of raw speed and performance Gentoo easily beats any RPM based distribution due to the fact that every app, and especially glibc is compiled and custom built for your environment. However, since I use high end equipment anyway, those differences in performance (Debian vs Gentoo) are not so dramatic in terms noticeable difference. I find the real value of Gentoo to be ease of use, ease of maintenance and most impotantly ease of configuration. Portage is an absolutely outstanding tool and will save you much time configuring your system and keeping it up-to-date with the latest software available. If your talking about the speed of an operating system you will have to take into account that much time can be wasted updating the system and resolving librabrary dependencies. Since Gentoo/Portage virtually eliminates all these tasks I find it to be the fastest Linux system around. This is of course a subjective point of view, however I can also tell you that my overall benchmarked compilation speed has increased by about 15 % since switching from Debian-Woody to Gentoo. So, yes my Gentoo Desktop does feel faster and more responsive. I use kernel version 4.17-r5 with the pre-emptive Kernel patch. This patch provides phenomenal Desktop performance, especially if you like to run multimedia apps on your Desktop (DVD Players, XMMs etc.) As I understand it, this patch has received a rave welcome and will be incorporated into the 2.5 Kernel tree. The current 2.4.18 and 2.4.19 Gentoo Kernels do not incorporate this patch by default, so if you want to use it you will have to apply it yourself.

Quite frankly, i think that Gentoo/Portage is the best thing that happened to Linux ever since Mr. and Mrs. Thorvalds decided to have children, and I am truly grateful to it's team of competent and compassionate developers.

Guest · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 4:41 pm Post subject:

Where can I get the preemptive kernel patch from? Any links on how to Patch? I've always just downloaded the entire tree and recompiled... damnit I guess I need to learn how to patch

nempo · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 4:52 pm Post subject:

yeah we need a guide on that "how-to patch" :oops:

bob_t

+BroNNoS+ · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 5:48 pm Post subject:

Well. I only know one distro that is faster on my machine: JBLinux. I don't know how they do it but it installs fast and runs blazing fast. But it is updated slowly (because it's mainly one guy who does all the work I think) and that's a drawback. JBLinux uses an different package tool as well, but without dep check in it (for now at least). But if you got the space, try it out.

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 6:33 am Post subject:

Ok, I'll make some time on the weekend and write a short patch-howto, specific to the pre-emptive kernel patch. Meanwhile for those who are impatient and familiar with applying patches, here's the link to obtain the patch:

http://www.tech9.net/rml/linux/

I have, despite my best efforts, NOT been able to apply this patch to the Gentoo 2.4.18 and 2.4.19 kernels (These Kernels come with patches of their own which seem to prevent a successful application of the pre-emptive kernel patch). Since the desktop performance of these two later kernels was unacceptable, I simply re-ermerged the sources for Kernel 2.4.17-r5 which comes with this patch already applied. If anybody is able to apply this patch to these kernels, feel free to share the info for the benefit of other Gentoo users.